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False-positive free transparent and optimal watermarking for colour images

Article  in  International Journal of Intelligent Information and Database Systems · January 2020

DOI: 10.1504/IJIIDS.2020.109460

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 False-positive free transparent and optimal watermarking for color
images
Neha Singh1, Sandeep Joshi2, Shilpi Birla1
1
Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering, Manipal University Jaipur, Jaipur, Rajasthan, India-
303007
1
Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Manipal University Jaipur, Jaipur, Rajasthan, India-303007

Abstract – Digital image watermarking serves as a tool for the protection of ownership of the media has been
successful. Embedding capacity, imperceptibility, and robustness are three requirements of any watermarking
technique. Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and Discrete Wavelet Transforms (DWT) have been much
used in this field. This paper presents a robust, blind watermarking technique for color images based on SVD
of DWT coefficients. The color (RGB) image is first converted into Hue, Saturation and Value (HSV) model
to segregate chromaticity information. The value plane undergoes 2-level DWT to represent the data in four
parts. Watermark is embedded in horizontal (HL) and vertical (LH) sub-bands of 2-level DWT. These sub-
bands are divided into non-overlapping blocks of size 4x 4. For each block, SVD is performed and the singular
values (SV) are updated based on watermark bit and using Lagrange's optimization principle. Two keys are
used during the embedding process. One of the keys is used to distribute watermark into two parts to be
embedded in two sub-bands. Another key is used as a quantization step size during optimization of the SV for
watermark embedding. The inverse of the embedding technique is used to extract the watermark. Experiments
show that the proposed technique is imperceptible as it offers PSNR > 40 dB. Also, the technique can resist
general image processing operations (attacks) on the images with the Structural Similarity Index Measure
(SSIM) nearly 1 and sufficiently high Bit Correct Ratio (BCR).
Keywords: Image Watermarking, Image processing, Singular Value Decomposition, Discrete Wavelet Transform

I. Introduction
Use of image watermarking as a tool for combatting copyright violation has long served as a secure tool to
the media owners. Watermark is generally chosen as a logo, text bearing owner’s information, owners
biometric or another image, which may be visible or invisible. Generally, text images bear a visible watermark,
because the content or information is not compromised due to additional data. However, for natural images
and other pictures, the addition of visible data may affect the look by perceived changes in objects, thereby
making the natural image unimpressive. Thus, the trend has been to develop invisible watermarking
techniques for media. This hidden watermark information is extracted or retrieved in an event of unauthorized
claim to establish ownership of a media. The watermarks may be added in spatial domain by modifying the
image data or pixel values directly. The spatial methods of image watermarking have high payload capacity
and low computational complexity, but these techniques are fragile to general image processing operations
(Lai and Tsai, 2010; Shivani and Senapati, 2018). The reason is that, even non-malicious image processing
operations may change the pixel values, which may alter the hidden watermark data.
On the contrary, watermarks may be embedded by modifying some transform coefficients of the original
image, generally termed as the cover image. These transform domain methods provide higher imperceptibility
along with better robustness against image processing operations and malicious attacks. Different image
quality measure, such as, Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM),
Cross Correlation (CC) and Bit Correct Ratio (BCR) are used to quantify the success of an image
watermarking technique.
Some common transforms used for image watermarking are Discrete Cosine transform (DCT) and Discrete
Wavelet Transform (DWT), Redundant Discrete Wavelet Transform (RDWT) and Integer Wavelet Transform
(IWT). These transforms represent the distribution of frequency information of the image differently. SVD is
yet another image transform which has been used extensively for image watermarking. Significant properties
of SVD (Lai and Tsai, 2010; Shivani and Senapati, 2018) which make it a preferred transform are: (i) ability
to provide low rank approximation; (ii) stability of SV even in the presence of perturbation; and (iii)
applicability to non-square images. At the same time, many SVD based techniques suffer from false positive
problem, described in the following section of this paper. This work uses false-positive free approach with
SVD for watermarking color images.
SVD has been combined with many different transforms like DWT (Lai and Tsai, 2010; Agoyi et al., 2014;
Messoussi et al., 2014; Bekkouch and Faraoun, 2015; Dong et al., 2015; Thajeel et al., 2018), RDWT (Agoyi
et.al, 2014), DCT (Messoussi et.al, 2014; Rehman et.al, 2016), IWT (Makbol and Khoo, 2014) individually
or with some other transforms. The work presented in (Zhou et al., 2018) combines SVD with All Phase
Discrete Cosine Biorthogonal Transform (APDCBT) and DWT. The work in (Mardanpour and Chahooki,
2016) pairs SVD and Shearlet transform.
The rest of the paper is organized in 4 sections as follow. Section II presents a brief introduction to SVD with
a highlight on the issue of false positive problem associated with it. Section III presents an overview of some
measures of imperceptibility and robustness for any watermarking technique. The proposed scheme is then
described in section IV followed by results presented in section V along with a comparison with other works
in this domain. Lastly, section VI concludes the paper.

II. SVD and issue of false positive

SVD is a method to decompose a square or rectangular matrix of size M×N into two orthonormal matrices of
size M×M and N×N respectively and a diagonal matrix of size M×N, as given in equation (1).
A (M×N) = U(M×M)×S(M×N)×V(N×N)T (1)
where orthonormal matrices U and V are called the left and right singular-vectors respectively, and the
diagonal matrix S contains SVs.
SVs of an image hold the luminance information of the image. These values are arranged in descending order
along the main diagonal of matrix S. The highest SV holds maximum energy of the image and so only a few
SVs will be sufficient to produce a close approximation of the original. The left and right singular-vectors are
column wise normalized Eigen-vectors of matrices AAT and ATA respectively. These singular-vectors hold
the information about image geometry. Two different images may have same SVs but their singular-vectors
will always be different.
SVs are very stable and do not show much deviation even in the presence of noise or any other perturbation.
Small deviations in singular-vectors fail the reconstruction of data. Consider the scenario shown in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1. Issue of false positive for SVD based watermarking

If singular vectors of an image A are used with SVs of another image B, in equation (1), the output is image
B instead of A. So, image B is falsely produced even when the SVs of A were used. The production of the
false image is referred to as the problem of false positive (Rehman et.al, 2016; Singh et.al, 2016; 2017). It is
an issue of major concern for many SVD based image watermarking techniques which modify the SVs of the
cover image by using equation (2)
𝑆𝑚𝑜𝑑𝑖𝑓𝑖𝑒𝑑 = 𝑆𝑐𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟 + 𝑠𝑓 × 𝑆𝑤𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑚𝑎𝑟𝑘 (2)
where 𝑆𝑚𝑜𝑑𝑖𝑓𝑖𝑒𝑑 is the modified S matrix of the cover whose original S matrix is 𝑆𝑐𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟 . The watermark is
represented as W and its SVs are hosted in 𝑆𝑤𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑚𝑎𝑟𝑘 . Sf in equation (2) is a constant called strength factor,
which determines the strength of watermark information embedded into cover data. A higher value of sf
ensures that the embedded information is strong enough to resist most of image processing operations. At the
same time, higher values of sf may result in the dominance of watermark information over the cover, which
makes the changes perceivable. Therefore, the choice of strength factor should be such that it offers robustness
against attacks, but the watermark remains imperceptible.
Watermark embedding equation, are required to be reversible for extraction of the watermark. The extraction
procedure for embedding equation (2) is given by equation (3).
𝑆𝑤𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑚𝑎𝑟𝑘 = (𝑆𝑚𝑜𝑑𝑖𝑓𝑖𝑒𝑑 − 𝑆𝑐𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟 )/𝑠𝑓 (3a)
𝑇
𝑊𝐸𝑥 = 𝑈𝑤𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑚𝑎𝑟𝑘 × 𝑆𝑤𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑚𝑎𝑟𝑘 × 𝑉𝑤𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑚𝑎𝑟𝑘 (3b)

where WEx is the extracted watermark obtained by multiplying retrieved and expected SVs with singular
vectors of the original watermark. This approach is used by (Agoyi et.al, 2014; Messoussi et.al, 2014; Rehman
et.al, 2016).
The requirement of singular vectors at the time of reconstruction of the watermark may cause the
watermarking technique to fail due to use of singular-vectors of some fake watermark. The solution to this
problem of false positive is to eliminate the requirement of singular-vectors during watermark extraction or
authenticate the singular-values being used, a priori. To eliminate the need of Singular vectors during
extraction, the watermark is embedded directly to the SVs using equation (4), as used in (Lai and Tsai, 2010;
Bekkouch and Faraoun, 2015; Makbol and Khoo, 2014 ; Fita and Endebu, 2019). The inverse equation used
for watermark extraction is given as equation (5).
𝑆𝑚𝑜𝑑𝑖𝑓𝑖𝑒𝑑 = 𝑆𝑐𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟 + 𝑠𝑓 ×W (4)
𝑊 = (𝑆𝑚𝑜𝑑𝑖𝑓𝑖𝑒𝑑 − 𝑆𝑐𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟 )/𝑠𝑓 (5)

where, the terms stand for the same meaning as those for equations (2) and (3). On the same lines, [4] uses
bidiagonal SVD with Shearlet Transform. Embedding is performed in accordance with equation (4) but,
during extraction before applying equation (5), an intermediate step requires the singular-vectors of the
original watermark. So, the problem of false positive may exist for this work.
Another solution to avoid false positives, Principal Components (PCs) may be embedded instead of the SVs
of the watermark as reported in (Shivani and Senapati, 2018; Singh et.al., 2017; Bassel et.al, 2017).
Embedding of PCs of the watermark is done according to the equation (6). Tt uses the left singular-vectors for
embedding and extraction of PCs need only right singular-vector to be supplied.
𝑆𝑚𝑜𝑑𝑖𝑓𝑖𝑒𝑑 = 𝑆𝑐𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟 + 𝑠𝑓 × 𝑃𝐶𝑤𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑚𝑎𝑟𝑘 (6)
𝑃𝐶𝑤𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑚𝑎𝑟𝑘 = (𝑆𝑚𝑜𝑑𝑖𝑓𝑖𝑒𝑑 − 𝑆𝑐𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟 )/𝑠𝑓 (7a)
𝑇
𝑊𝐸𝑥 = 𝑃𝐶𝑤𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑚𝑎𝑟𝑘 × 𝑉𝑤𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑚𝑎𝑟𝑘
where 𝑃𝐶𝑤𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑚𝑎𝑟𝑘 is the Principal Components of the watermark obtained as 𝑈𝑤𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑚𝑎𝑟𝑘 × 𝑆𝑤𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑚𝑎𝑟𝑘 .
Only the correct right singular-vector can retrieve the information. The watermark retrieval fails if right
singular-vectors of some other fake watermark are used.
To use equation (2) and (3) without being exposed to false positives, authentication of supplied singular-
vectors may be performed before watermark extraction. The work in ((Makbol and Khoo, 2014; Singh et al.,
2019) uses signatures of singular-vectors to be verified before proceeding for watermark extraction.
Another possibility to avoid the use of singular-vectors is to use blind watermarking, which does not require
originals during extraction. Such work is reported in the papers (Singh and Sharma, 2010; Hore and Ziou,
2010; Chen et al., 2016). The binary watermark bits are optimally embedded in SVs in The coefficients in U
matrix are modified to embed watermark information blindly in (Chen et al., 2016).
The technique proposed in the paper is blind and so it eliminates the requirement of singular-vectors during
watermark extraction.
Another scenario of false positive is when some false key is used to extract the watermark.

III. Performance indices

Success of a watermarking technique is measured in terms of imperceptibility and its robustness against
malicious and non-malicious attacks. Imperceptibility is measured as PSNR (Hore and Ziou, 2010), expressed
in terms of Mean Square Error (MSE) between the cover image and its watermarked version, by equation (8).
 max(𝐶(𝑖,𝑗)2 )
𝑃𝑆𝑁𝑅 (𝑑𝐵) = 10 𝑙𝑜𝑔 (8)
𝑀𝑆𝐸
th th
where, C is the cover image and C(i, j) represent the pixel value at i row and j column of the cover, and
MSE is defined as equation (9).
∑𝑀 𝑁
𝑖=1 ∑𝑗=1[𝐶(𝑖,𝑗)−𝐶𝑤 (𝑖,𝑗)]
2
𝑀𝑆𝐸 = (9)
𝑀×𝑁
where, C is the cover image and Cw is the watermarked image, whose sizes are 𝑀 × 𝑁 each.
𝐶(𝑖, 𝑗) and 𝐶𝑤 (𝑖, 𝑗) represent the pixel value at the ith row and jth column in cover and watermarked image
respectively. PSNR measures imperceptibility in terms of the deviation of pixel values caused due to
embedding watermark. Higher values of PSNR indicate smaller MSE and hence a minimum change in the
original image. This measure of image quality does not consider Human Visual System (HVS). It is observed
that most of the work in image watermarking achieve 𝑃𝑆𝑁𝑅 ≥ 35𝑑𝐵 (Zhang et. al, 2017; Shivani and
Senapati, 2018; Singh et.al, 2016; 2017).
Another image quality measure is Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) (Hore and Ziou, 2010) which
models difference in images A and B, in terms of difference in their luminance, l(A,B), contrast, c(A,B) and
correlation s(A,B), as given in equation (10).
𝑆𝑆𝐼𝑀(𝐴, 𝐵) = [𝑙(𝐴, 𝐵)]𝛼 [𝑐(𝐴, 𝐵)]𝛽 [𝑠(𝐴, 𝐵)]𝛾 (10)
2𝜇𝐴 𝜇𝐵 +𝐶1
where, 𝑙(𝐴, 𝐵) = 2 +𝜇 2 +𝐶 (11)
𝜇𝐴 𝐵 1
2𝜎𝐴 𝜎𝐵 +𝐶2
𝑐(𝐴, 𝐵) = 2 +𝜎 2 +𝐶 (12)
𝜎𝐴 𝐵 2
2𝜎𝐴𝐵 +𝐶3
𝑠(𝐴, 𝐵) = (13)
2𝜎𝐴 𝜎𝐵 +𝐶3
𝐶3 = 𝐶2/2 (14)
For 𝛼 = 𝛽 = 𝛾 = 1, SSIM is expressed as in equation (15).
(2𝜇𝐴 𝜇𝐵 +𝐶1 ) (2𝜎𝐴𝐵 +𝐶2 )
𝑆𝑆𝐼𝑀(𝐴, 𝐵) = (15)
(𝜇2𝐴 +𝜇2𝐵 +𝐶1 ) (𝜎2 +𝜎2 +𝐶2)
𝐴 𝐵
The value of SSIM lies in the range [0, 1], where, SSIM =1 refers to identical images and SSIM =0 refers to
completely different images.
PSNR and SSIM are used to measure the imperceptibility of the watermark embedding method (Hore and
Ziou, 2010). To measure the similarity between the original and extracted watermark during the extraction
process, SSIM may be used. Other standard measures used are CC and Bit Correct Ratio (BCR).
CC is measured using equation (16).
∑𝑀 𝑁 ̅ ̅
𝑖=1 ∑𝑗=1(𝐴(𝑖,𝑗)−𝐴)(𝐵(𝑖,𝑗)− 𝐵 )
𝐶𝐶 = (16)
√(∑𝑀 𝑁 ̅ 2 𝑀 𝑁 ̅ 2
𝑖=1 ∑𝑗=1(𝐴(𝑖,𝑗)−𝐴) )(∑𝑖=1 ∑𝑗=1(𝐵(𝑖,𝑗)− 𝐵 ) )
where, 𝐴̅ and 𝐵̅ represent the mean of image A and B respectively. The value of CC lies in the range [-1,1],
where CC =1 refers to completely similar images and CC =-1 refers to completely complement images. CC
=0 refers to complete dissimilarity between the two images.
BCR is yet another simple and most frequently used measure to find the ratio of correctly identified bits with
respect to total number of bits. This measure is useful for binary images used as watermark. If A and B are
assumed to be original and extracted watermark respectively, BCR is measured as given by equation (17).
𝑛𝑢𝑚𝑏𝑒𝑟 𝑜𝑓 𝑐𝑜𝑟𝑟𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑙𝑦 𝑒𝑥𝑡𝑟𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑒𝑑 𝑏𝑖𝑡𝑠
𝐵𝐶𝑅 = × 100 (17)
𝑇𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑙 𝑛𝑢𝑚𝑏𝑒𝑟 𝑜𝑓 𝑏𝑖𝑡𝑠
Sometimes, Bit Error Ratio (BER), expressed as percentage, is also used which is related to BCR and
expressed as given in equation (18).
𝐵𝐸𝑅 = 100 − 𝐵𝐶𝑅 (18)

The work presented in (Agoyi et al., 2014) improves the quality of extracted watermark by using two copies
of the same watermark, embedded in different sub-bands. During extraction, the average value of each pixel
is calculated using thresholding based on extracted copies of the watermark. This paper embeds the watermark
bits into SVs such that PSNR is maximized using Lagrange’s optimization of the quantized levels.
IV. Proposed Work
The cover images and the watermarks used are shown in Fig. 2. The cover images are taken from a freely
available USC-SIPI image database.

Cover 1 Cover 2 Cover 3 Cover 4 Cover 5

(a)

(b)
Fig. 2. (a) Cover images (b) watermark images
The major components of an image watermarking system are (Singh et.al, 2017) : watermark generation WGn(
), embedding WEm( ), detection WDe( ) and extraction WEx( ). Fig. 3 shows each of these components with
its input and output.

Optional input

Fig. 3. Major components of image watermarking system

The proposed work uses a binary logo of size 32 × 64 to be embedded into a color image, so the need of
WGn( ) is eliminated. However, another block is used instead which pre-processes the watermark before
embedding function is performed. The inputs and outputs for this block are shown in Fig. 4 and the function
WPr( ) used is given in Fig. 5.

Watermark Watermark Pre-

Processed watermark
processing
Key1 WM1, WM2
WPr( )

Fig. 4. Block for watermark pre-processing

The 2048 bits of the binary watermark are arranged into a vector which is divided into two equal parts, based
on the key, key1, as shown in Fig. 5. Each part is separately embedded into two different sub-bands.
 function [WM1, WM2] = WPr (watermark, key1)

1: Shuffle watermark bits randomly based on the key, key1 and reshape into a
vector.
2: For each watermark bit location (1….2048)
if mod (location, 2) = 0
Assign corresponding watermark bit to WM1;
Else assign corresponding watermark bit to WM2;
End if;
End for;
Fig. 5. Function for watermark partitioning
The outline of the proposed watermark embedding and extraction method is shown in Fig. 6. (a) and (b)
respectively.

Convert RGB to HSV image 2-level DWT of V-plane

Cover
Use V-plane [LL2, HL2, LH2, HH2]
Image

Divide HL2 and LH2 into 4 x

Binary Watermark Key 1
4 non-overlapping blocks

Use Function WPr( ) to

divide watermark into Use Function WEm( ) to
two parts, WM1 and embed WM1 into HL2 and
WM2 Key 2 WM2 in LH2

Watermarke 2-level IDWT to obtain V-plane

Convert HSV to RGB image
d Image

(a)

Watermarked Convert RGB to HSV image 2-level DWT of V-plane

Image Use V-plane [LL2, HL2, LH2, HH2]

Divide HL2 and LH2 into 4 x 4

non-overlapping blocks
Key 1

Recovered binary Use Function WEx( ) to

Use key 1 to combine
extract WM1 from HL2 and Key 2
Watermark WM1 and WM2
WM2 from LH2

(b)
Fig. 6. Proposed method (a) Watermark Embedding (b) Watermark Extraction
For a cover image of size 512 × 512, 2-level sub-bands, LH2 and HL2 are obtained for size 128× 128. These
sub-bands are divided into non-overlapping blocks of size 4 × 4, such that each block optimally embeds one
watermark bit into its SV. The function WEm( ) used for embedding watermark into cover image is given in
Fig. 7 with the optimization function in Fig. 8.
 function watermarked_image = WEm (cover, watermark, key2)
1: [LL2, HL2, LH2, HH2] = 2-level_DWT (cover);
2: For sub-band HL2
Divide the sub-bands into 4x4 non-overlapping blocks
For each_block,
Take SVD: [U, S, V] = SVD (each_block);
Store diagonal values of S in a vector, Svector
Update Svector using function optimizeS given in Fig. 8.
HL2-updated = Reconstruct block using updated SV.
End For;
Arrange all updated blocks
End For;
3: Repeat step 2 for LH2 band to obtain LH2-updated
4: Watermarked_image = 2-level Inverse DWT(LL2, HL2-updated, LH2-updated, HH2

Fig. 7: Watermark embedding algorithm

SV in Sk for kth block are updated based on Lagrange’s Optimization Principle to maximize PSNR such that
W× Snew = constant, where constant is defined as per the rules in Fig. 8. The input to the optimization function
is a vector of SV for a block, binary watermark and a key. The key is used as the quantization step size.

function Svector_new = OptimizeS (Svector, watermark, key2)

1: Define weight matrix W = ones(1, 4);
2: Find temp = sum (Svector)/key2;
3: Find Uk = floor (temp + 0.5);
4: Define constant
If mod (Uk, 2) = WM(k), kth watermark bit
Constant = Uk × key2;
Else If mod (Uk, 2) ≠ wk and Uk – floor(temp) = 0
Constant = (Uk + 1) × key2;
Else If mod (Uk, 2) ≠ wk and Uk – floor(temp) ≠ 0
Constant = (Uk - 1) × key2;
End If;
End If;
End If;
(𝑆𝑣𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑜𝑟_𝑛𝑒𝑤−𝑆𝑣𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑜𝑟)𝑇 (𝑆𝑣𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑜𝑟_𝑛𝑒𝑤−𝑆𝑣𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑜𝑟)
5: Obtain Svector_new by Minimizing subject to
2552 𝑚𝑛
W× Snew = constant;
Fig. 8: Optimization function

Based on watermark embedded into SV (read as a vector, Svector) and definition of PSNR in equation (8) and
(9), PSNR for the watermarked image with respect to the cover is defined as in equation (1).

2552 ×𝑀×𝑁
𝑃𝑆𝑁𝑅 = 10 𝑙𝑜𝑔10 ( ‖𝑆𝑣𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑜𝑟 2
) (18)
𝑛𝑒𝑤 −𝑆𝑣𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑜𝑟‖

Using Lagrange’s principle of optimization (Huang et.al, 2015; Chen et.al, 2016) the performance index for
minimization is defined in equation (19).
(𝑆𝑣𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑜𝑟_𝑛𝑒𝑤−𝑆𝑣𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑜𝑟)𝑇 (𝑆𝑣𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑜𝑟_𝑛𝑒𝑤−𝑆𝑣𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑜𝑟)
𝑓(𝑆𝑣𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑜𝑟_𝑛𝑒𝑤) = (19)
2552 ×𝑀×𝑁

The proposed technique is false positive free because extraction of the watermark from the watermarked image
does not require the original cover or watermark. Such techniques which do not use originals (cover and/or
watermark) during extraction are called blind watermarking techniques. The watermark bits are extracted from
the SV of non-overlapping blocks of HL3 and LH3 bands of the watermarked image. Using the same
quantization step size as used during embedding, extraction is performed with steps shown in Fig. 9.
 function extracted_WM = WEx (watermarked image)

1: [LL2, HL2, LH2, HH2] = 2-level_DWT(watermarked image);

2: For sub-band HL2
Divide the sub-bands into 8x8 non-overlapping blocks
For each_block,
Take SVD: [U, S, V] = SVD (each_block);
Store diagonal values of S in a vector, Svector
Find Uk = floor (sum (Svector)/key + 0.5);
kth bit of watermark, WM1(k) = mod(Uk, 2)
End For;
3: Repeat for sub-band LH2 to obtain WM2(k)
4: extracted_WM = Combine WM1 and WM2 using key1 to obtain complete watermark of 2048 bits.

Fig. 9. Watermark extraction process

V. Results and comparisons

As outlined in section III of this paper, there are many measures for imperceptibility and robustness of a
watermarking technique. This section analyses the proposed work with respect to these measures, PSNR,
BCR, BER, SSIM and CC. The first experiment carried out with cover image 1 and the first watermark from
Fig. 2. The effect of quantization step size is studied over the four performance indices of section III. The
graph in Fig. 9 shows the dependence of the four performance measures on the quantization step size,
identified as key2. PSNR is measured (in dB) between the watermarked image and the original cover as a
measure of imperceptibility for the embedding technique. It is observed that with increasing step size, PSNR
decreases because of smaller quantization step size. Also, SSIM between these images reduces showing that
dissimilarity between the original and watermarked image increases due to more noise introduced by larger
step sizes. Reduction in PSNR is always accompanied with higher BCR and hence higher similarity between
the extracted and original watermark, as shown in Fig. 10 respectively. This is because watermark becomes
strongly embedded with larger step size, increasing perturbations in the cover resulting in higher PSNR. At
the same time, strongly embedded watermark will be more robust to attacks and hence higher BCR during
extraction.

100 1.01
90
1
80
70
0.99
PSNR and BCR

60
SSIM

50 0.98
40
0.97
30
20
0.96
10
0 0.95
10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 110 120 130 140 150 160 170 180 190 200
Quantization step size

BCR PSNR SSIM(Cover) SSIM(Watermark)

Fig. 10. Dependence of performance measures on quantization step size

For these experiments, blocksize for blindly embedding one watermark bit in each block is taken as 4 × 4.
The cover images are of size 512 × 512 and the watermark is 32× 64 in size with 2048 bits. Fig. 11 shows
the watermarked images when watermark image 1 is used with all cover images. The value of PSNR for each
watermarked image is fixed at nearly 50 dB by varying the step size. Values for SSIM and CC are quite high
for these images.

Watermarked
Image

PSNR (dB) 50.0232 50.4125 50.1030

Step size 30 28 30
SSIM 0.9950 0.9982 0.9947
CC 0.9999 0.9999 0.9939

Watermarked
Image

PSNR (dB) 50.4279 50.0369

Step size 28 30
SSIM 0.9961 0.9942
CC 0.9999 0.9996
Fig. 11. Watermarked images with PSNR ≈ 50dB
For the results to follow, PSNR for all cover images is kept nearly 40 dB for which the required quantization
step size for SVs is 100. Fig. 12 shows PSNR in dB for each pair of cover image and watermark at step size
of 100.

40.3
40.2
40.1
PSNR (dB)

40
39.9
39.8
39.7
39.6
Cover 1 Cover 2 Cover 3 Cover 4 Cover 5
Watermark 1 40.1538 40.0893 39.9277 40.1742 40.0166
Watermark 2 40.1332 40.1329 39.9669 40.2147 40.1913
Watermark 3 40.048 40.0023 39.8907 40.2218 39.8681
COVER IMAGES

Fig. 12 PSNR for watermarked images with different watermarks (at step size =100)
For each of the pair used in Fig. 12, the watermark extraction process is applied and the results are shown in
Table 1. The numerical value with the extracted watermarks is the BCR which is used as a measure of
performance for the proposed work. Three different watermarks are embedded with the same keys and
blocksize. Higher BCR is expected to give high SSIM due to better match with the original watermark.
Table 1. Extracted watermarks for each of the cover image with BCR (step size = 100)
Watermarks Watermark1 Watermark 2 Watermark 3
Covers Binary logo Binary logo Random binary
image

93.9453 93.2129 93.75

96.4355 95.1172 94.9707

91.6016 90.1367 90.4297

92.1875 91.748 91.8457

95.5078 95.5078 95.752

For different covers and watermarks, PSNR is well above 35dB and BCR of the extracted watermark is well
above 90%. Thus the technique ensures imperceptibility and robustness. Further, the test for robustness is
carried out under different image processing attacks. Fig. 13 shows the watermarked image 1 after different
attacks when watermark 1 was embedded.

(a) Median filtering (3x3) (b) Gaussian filter (5x5) (c) Scaling (0.5→2) (d) Scaling (2→0.5)
 (e) Salt & pepper noise (f) Speckle Noise (g) Gaussian Noise (h) Gaussian Noise
(var = 0.001) (0.0001) (var=0.001) (var=0.0005)

(i) Histogram equalization (j) Compression (k) Compression (l) Compression

(QF=90) (QF=70) (QF=50)

(m) Sharpening (n) Contrast enhancement (o) Rotation (45) (p) Rotation (10)

(q) Cropping (64x64) (r) Cropping (128x128) (s) Cropping (256x256) (t) Cropping (64x64)

Fig. 13. Cover image 1 attacked after watermarking with watermark image 1
Watermark extraction is carried out for each of the attacked image shown in Fig. 13. Watermarks extracted
from these attacked images are shown in Fig. 14. It is observed that under most of the attacks, the watermark
is preserved and it is highly similar to the original one.

(a) Median filtering (3x3) (b) Gaussian filter (5x5) (c) Scaling (0.5→2) (d) Scaling (2→0.5)

(e) Salt & pepper noise (f) Speckle Noise (g) Gaussian Noise (h) Gaussian Noise
(var = 0.001) (0.0001) (var=0.001) (var=0.0005)
 (i) Histogram equalization (j) Compression (k) Compression (l) Compression
(QF=90) (QF=70) (QF=50)

(m) Sharpening (n) Contrast enhancement (o) Rotation (45) (p) Rotation (10)

(q) Cropping (64x64) (r) Cropping (128x128) (s) Cropping (256x256) (t) Cropping
(128x128)
Fig. 14. Extracted watermark from attacked images of Fig. 13
The proposed work is compared with the existing techniques too. Table 2 highlights the important points of
comparison and differences between the considered techniques. The work presented in this paper has been
tested for two types of binary watermark generally used practically, a logo as well as a randomly generated
image. Use of two keys add to the security of the proposed techniques because, wrong key will not be able to
extract the watermark correctly. For the color images, Hue Saturation and Value (HSV) model has been used
and the embedding is done in Value plane to preserve chromaticity information.
Table 2. Highlights of proposed work with existing techniques
Work Transform Cover Watermark Watermark No. of Key Blind/non PSNR
used type type size keys description -blind (dB)
[17] DWT Gray Random 64 bits 01 quantization Blind >50
SVD binary step size
sequence
[11] Shearlet Gray Logo 256×256 nil Not applicable Non-blind 67.75
SVD
[10] DWT Gray Logo 32×32×2 nil Not applicable Non-blind 101.97
APDCBT
SVD
[15] SVD Gray Logo 64×64 1 Key for Arnold Blind 49.07
spatial domain Transform
(step size= 64)
[7] Slantlet Color Logo No mention 01 Key for Arnold Blind 50.976
Schur decomp Transform
DCT
Contourlet
[22] SVD Color Logo 32×32×3 nil Not applicable Blind SSIM =
0.9968
Proposed DWT-SVD Color Logo, 32×64 02 Key1: To divide Blind 50.0232
work quantization Random watermark
(Step-size= binary randomly into
30) sequence two parts Key2:
quantization
step size

Lastly, a comparison of the performance indices for the proposed work has been carried out with the mentioned
existing works in Table 3.
Table 3. Comparison of proposed work with existing work
Attack Proposed work [11] [10] [15] [7] [22] [17]
BER SSIM CC CC CC CC CC CC BER
Median filtering
16.3574 0.9921 0.6748 0.98 0.9793 0.9386 0.9918 0.7136 5.27
(3 x 3)
Averaging filter
35.6445 0.9791 0.2865 0.97 0.9741 0.8641 - - -
(3 x 3)
Gaussian Filter
7.5195 0.9964 0.8552 0.9902 - - - - -
(3 x 3)
Gaussian noise
14.2090 0.9920 0.7367 - - 0.7099 0.9981 - 21.87
(var= 0.0005)
 Salt & pepper
26.4160 0.9831 0.5011 0.99 0.9988 0.9923 0.9970 - -
noise (0.001)
Speckle Noise
10.5469 0.9947 0.7993 0.99 - 0.9944 0.9985 - -
(0.0001)
Scaling
12.9395 0.9938 0.7461 0.98 0.9672 0.9538 - 0.9037 -
(0.5→2)
Scaling
5.9082 0.9973 0.8855 - 0.9638 1 - 0.9921 -
(2→0.5)
Compression
8.0566 0.9962 0.8424 0.99 - 1 - 0.9955 -
(QF=90)
Compression 3.12
18.8477 0.9909 0.6243 0.9932 > 0.95 - 0.8772
(QF=40) (QF=30)
Sharpening
7.7148 0.9963 0.8507 0.9816 - 0.9724 - 1 -
(0.2)
Cropping
17.1875 0.9913 0.6666 - - 0.7828 - - -
(256x256)
Cropping
11.1328 0.9951 0.7773 0.9799 - - - - -
(12.5%)
Histogram
35.9863 0.9785 0.2802 0.986 - - - - -
Equalization
Rotation (10⁰) 12.8418 0.9941 0.7451
Rotation (45⁰) 37.07
16.0645 0.9924 0.6797 0.9642 - - - - (for 1
degree)

VI. Conclusions and Future Work

The proposed work shows promising results for watermarking color images. The technique is imperceptible
and robust against major image processing operations. However, if the level of DWT is further increased to
3-level, better PSNR and BCR are expected to be achieved. However, this is achieved at the cost of smaller
watermarks. Since there is no requirement of the originals at the time of extraction, the technique is able to
resist false positive watermark extraction. Additional security is provided by the keys used during embedding
and extraction. Without using the actual key the watermark is not extracted successfully. Future work aims to
use some other optimization method to improve imperceptibility further. Moreover, this robust technique can
be used for authenticating the watermark for fragile and non-blind watermarking.

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