Digital Watermarking in the Transform Domain with Emphasis on SVD

The chapter illustrates watermarking based on the transform domain. It argues that transform-based watermarking is robust to possible attacks and imperceptible with respect to the quality of the multimedia file we would like to protect. Among those transforms commonly used in communications, we emphasize the use of singular value decomposition (SVD) for digital watermarking. The main advantage of this choice is flexibility of application. In fact, SVD may be applied in several fields where data are organized as matrices, including multimedia and communications.We present a robust SVD-based watermarking scheme for images. According to the detection steps, the watermark can be determined univocally, while other related works present flaws in watermark detection. A case study of our approach refers to the protection of geographical and spatial data in case of the raster representation model of maps.