An FPP-resistant SVD-based image watermarking scheme based on chaotic control

Image watermarking commonly involves singular value decomposition (SVD) because of its simplicity and minimal effect on image quality. However, SVD-based image watermarking schemes suffer from some drawbacks such as the false positive problem (FPP), and an undesirable trade-off between vital properties such as imperceptibility, embedding capacity, and robustness. To address these drawbacks, we improve upon the SVD-based color image watermarking by incorporating integer wavelet transform (IWT) and chaotic maps. A grayscale image watermark is decomposed into eight gray levels (bit-planes) before being encrypted and re-ordered by a chaotic sequence. Each encrypted bit-plane is inserted into singular values of the sub-bands of a host image. The embedding process is controlled by chaos-based multiple scaling factors (MSF) which are updated in each embedded bit-plane. The resulting values are involved in generating a hash value at the end of the embedding processes. The hash value is used to overcome FPP issues and improves security. Our findings illustrate the proposed scheme’s robustness, security, imperceptibility, and capacity. It also exhibits excellent robustness against attacks and its performance surpasses a variety of existing schemes. In addition, the proposed scheme is hypersensitive to even the slightest secret key variations.