A new DWT-SVD based perceptual fidelity metric for quality assessment of watermaking schemes

Abstract

A new DWT-SVD perceptual fidelity metric for the evaluation of watermarking schemes is introduced in this paper. A widely used Human Visual Model in the Discrete Wavelet Transform domain is employed by the metric to account for the frequency sensitivity, and the local luminance and contrast masking effects of the human eye. A relationship between the visual model in the DWT domain and the modification of the wavelet coefficients singular values is derived. Subjective experiments are used to validate the proposed metric, and its performance is compared to several state-of-the-art perceptual image distortion metrics. The paper focuses on Image Adaptive Watermarking methods in the Discrete Wavelet Transform Domain since they yield better results regarding robustness and transparency than other watermarking schemes.