A novel SVD-based watermarking scheme for protecting rightful ownership of digital images

Watermarking is a data embedding technique widely used to protect rightful ownership of digital images. In recent years, several SVD-based watermarking schemes have been proposed in the literatures. However, although most existing schemes can provide good image quality of the watermarked image and robust embedded watermarks, some still need to store extra data or use an original image in order to extract the watermark. To overcome these drawbacks, in this paper, we propose a novel SVD-based watermarking scheme that contains a recovery mechanism so that the watermarked image can be recovered to satisfactory condition after rightful ownership of an image has been established. To extend the application of the proposed scheme into commercial applications, we also present a variant that inherits the properties of the proposed scheme and provides higher image quality in a restored image after the embedded watermark is extracted. Experimental results confirm that our primary scheme can withstand a variety of image processing techniques and that our variant can successfully reduce the difference between a compressed host image and a restored image to less than 2 dB.