Adaptive image watermarking scheme in Contourlet transform using singular value decomposition

In this paper, the authors propose a novel image watermarking scheme based on contourlet transform and singular value decomposition. We embed watermark bits in singular value vectors of the embedded blocks within lowpass subband in contourlet transform. We further adaptively apply quantization index modulation for embedding watermark according to energy distribution and human visual masking to achieve better performance in terms of perceptually invisibility and robustness of the watermark. The experimental results show that the proposed adaptive watermarking scheme is robust against JPEG compression, lowpass filtering, noise addition, resizing and cropping attacks. The comparison analysis demonstrates that our scheme has better performance than the watermarking schemes reported recently.