Visual Quality Improvement of Watermarked Image Based on Singular Value Decomposition Using Walsh Hadamard Transform

Abstract Embedding the watermark is still a challenge in image watermarking. The watermark should not reduce the visual quality of the image being watermarked and hard to distinguish from its original. Embedding a watermark of a small size might be a good solution. However, the watermark might be easy to lose if there is any tampering with the watermarked image. This research proposes to increase the visual quality of the watermarked image using the Walsh Hadamard transform, which is applied to the singular value decomposition-based image watermarking. Technically, the watermark image is converted into a low bit-rate signal before being embedded in the host image. Using various watermark sizes, experimental results show that the proposed method could produce a good imperceptibility with 47.10 dB on average and also gives robustness close to the original watermark with a normalized correlation close to 1 on average. The proposed method can also recognize the original watermark from the tampered watermarked image at different levels of robustness.