Genetic Algorithm approach for Singular Value Decomposition and Quantization based Digital Image Watermarking

Watermarking, which belong to information hiding field, has seen a lot of research interest recently. Digital watermarking is a technique providing embedded copyright information in images. It is used for content protection, copyright management, content authentication and tamper detection. Digital watermarking algorithms were proposed using spatial domain and transform domain techniques. The transform domain could be DFT, DCT, DWT or SVD. Several digital watermarking algorithms using Genetic Algorithms are available in the literature. In this paper, a modified image watermarking scheme based on Singular Value Decomposition, Edge detection and Genetic Algorithm is proposed. The proposed scheme is based on quantization step size optimization using the Genetic Algorithm to improve the quality of watermarked image and robustness of the watermark. This algorithm is more secure and robust to various attacks, viz., Low Pass Filtering, Median Filtering, Rotation, Resizing, JPEG Compression, Salt & Pepper Noise, Row-Column blanking, Row-Column Copying etc. Experimental results are compared with the proposed method and the algorithm proposed by Rui et al. in terms of Normalized Cross correlation (NC) and Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR). KeywordsDigital Image Watermarking, Singular Value Decomposition, Edge Detection, Quantization, Genetic Algorithm.