An image watermarking scheme in wavelet domain with optimized compensation of singular value decomposition via artificial bee colony

Digital image watermarking is the process of authenticating a digital image by embedding a watermark into it and thereby protecting the image from copyright infringement. This paper proposes a novel robust image watermarking scheme developed in the wavelet domain based on the singular value decomposition (SVD) and artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm. The host image is transformed into an invariant wavelet domain by applying redistributed invariant wavelet transform, subsequently the low frequency sub-band of wavelet transformed image is segmented into non-overlapping blocks. The most suitable embedding blocks are selected using the human visual system for the watermark embedding. The watermark bits are embedded into the target blocks by modifying the first column coefficients of the left singular vector matrix of SVD decomposition with the help of a threshold and the visible distortion caused by the embedding is compensated by modifying the coefficients of the right singular vector matrix employing compensation parameters. Furthermore, ABC is employed to obtain the optimized threshold and compensation parameters. Experimental results, compared with the related existing schemes, demonstrated that the proposed scheme not only possesses the strong robustness against image manipulation attacks, but also, is comparable to other schemes in term of visual quality.