Image Watermarking Scheme Using Genetic Algorithm

With the development of Internet and multimedia technologies, multimedia copyright protection and content authentication have become serious problems that need to be solved urgently. Digital watermarking has been regarded as an effective solution to protect various kinds of digital contents against illegal use. In this paper, a watermarking technique which uses the singular value decomposition is presented. The singular values of a cover image are modified by multiple scaling factors to embed the watermark image. Since the values of scaling factors determine the watermark strength; therefore, we use the genetic algorithm to search the proper values in order to satisfy both imperceptibility and robustness requirements. Experimental results are provided to illustrate that the proposed technique is able to withstand some image-processing attacks.