Robust and false positive free watermarking in IWT domain using SVD and ABC

Watermarking is used to protect the copyrighted materials from being misused and help us to know the lawful ownership. The security of any watermarking scheme is always a prime concern for the developer. In this work, the robustness and security issue of IWT (integer wavelet transform) and SVD (singular value decomposition) based watermarking is explored. Generally, SVD based watermarking techniques suffer with an issue of false positive problem. This leads to even authenticating the wrong owner. We are proposing a novel solution to this false positive problem; that arises in SVD based approach. Firstly, IWT is employed on the host image and then SVD is performed on this transformed host. The properties of IWT and SVD help in achieving high value of robustness. Singular values are used for the watermark embedding. In order to further improve the quality of watermarking, the optimization of scaling factor (mixing ratio) is performed with the help of artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm. A comparison with other schemes is performed to show the superiority of proposed scheme. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.