A hybrid watermarking scheme using contourlet transform and singular value decomposition

In this paper, we propose a new robust hybrid watermarking technique based on recently introduced contourlet transform and singular value decomposition. After applying the contourlet transform for the original image, we select the low frequency directional sub band coefficients and apply singular value decomposition. The singular values of the original image are then modified by the singular values of contourlet transformed binary logo watermark image. Combination of these two transforms on image improves the performance of watermarking algorithm. It has been observed that, in comparison with other contourlet based and wavelet based methods, the proposed method shows the higher imperceptibility and robustness against common image processing attacks such as Jpeg compression, Jpeg 2000 compression, resizing, median filtering, histogram equalization, sharpening, and Gama correction.