SVD and Error Control Coding Based Digital Image Watermarking

Digital media is a craze these days. With the present day Internet connectivity the world has become smaller. The copyright protections of intellectual properties have become a necessity for prevention of illegal copying and content integrity verification. Newer data hiding techniques that satisfy the requirements of imperceptibility, robustness, capacity, or data hiding rate and security of the hidden data etc. are being developed. Therefore the preference to go for digital image watermarking, to show resiliency against various unintentional or deliberate attacks has increased. Watermarking is a method of data authentication by embedding a watermark in image characteristics with expectation. Here in this work, this is done using a mathematical tool called the singular value decomposition (SVD). Earlier SVD had been used individually, as a tool for watermarking of digital media, but this work incorporates error control coding to it, by a novel zig-zag scan operation on pixels done before coding, thereby increasing the robustness. This work here by focuses on using both of them together to provide a robust technique developed for protection of the intellectual property against the popular malicious attacks. The algorithm is later applied and tested on the standard checkmark techniques practically by attacking the watermarked image against standard simulated attacks and recovering the watermarked logo from it.