A new robust watermarking scheme for color images

This article presents a method of semi-blind watermarking based on the discrete wavelet transform, that uses the chrominance components of the image for watermark embedding. The watermark is resistant to usual image processing operations such as compression, noise addition, cropping, histogram adjustment and filtering.

In this paper, a quantization based watermark casting and blind watermark retrieval algorithm operating in YCbCr color space using discrete wavelet transform (DWT), for ownership verification and image authentication applications is implemented. This method uses implicit visual masking by inserting watermark bits into only the wavelet coefficients of high magnitude, in Y channel of YCbCr color space. A blind watermark retrieval technique that can detect the embedded watermark without the help from the original uncorrupted image is devised which is computationally efficient. The new watermarking algorithm combines and adapts various aspects from existing watermarking methods. Experimental results show that the proposed technique to embed watermark provides extra imperceptibility and robustness against various signal processing attacks in comparison with the same technique in RGB color space.

Digital watermarking is an effective way to protect copyright. In this paper, a robust watermarking algorithm based on wavelet transformation is proposed which can confirm the copyright without original image. The wavelet transformation technique is effective in image analyzing and processing. Thus the color-image watermark algorithm based on discrete wavelet transformation (DWT) begins to draw an increasing attention. In the proposed approach, the watermark Encrypt by Arnold transform and the host image is converted into the YCbCr color space. Then its Y channel decomposed into wavelet coefficients and the selected approximation coefficients are quantized and then their least significant bit of the quantized coefficients is replaced by the Encrypted watermark using LSB insertion technique. The experimental results show that watermark embedded by this algorithm is of better robustness and extra imperceptibility and robustness against wavelet compression compared to the traditional embedding methods in RGB color space.

Multimedia Tools and Applications, 2020

At present, some watermarking techniques have been proposed to protect the copyright of image either in frequency domain or in spatial domain. Designing a combined-domain watermarking algorithm is a difficult problem, which not only has short running time of spatial-domain watermarking algorithm but also has strong robustness of transformdomain watermarking algorithm. In this paper, a novel color image watermarking algorithm in spatial domain combining the principle of discrete Wavelet transform (DWT) is presented to embed color watermark image into color carrier image. At first, how to get the first low-frequency coefficient of DWT in spatial domain is analyzed. Then, the changing quantity of the first low-frequency coefficient in spatial domain is calculated by the presented algorithm. According to the presented features of the first low-frequency coefficient, the processes of embedding watermark and extracting watermark information are finished in spatial-domain instead of DWT. This presented algorithm has the following two innovations: (i) the first low-frequency coefficient of DWT is computed by image pixels in spatial domain; (ii) the presented algorithm is as robust as the transform-domain watermarking methods, and it is as rapid as the spatial-domain watermarking methods. The simulation data shows the presented algorithm has good watermarking performances as respect to visual imperceptibility, robustness, payload, and running time.

Journal of Science and Technology: Issue on Information and Communications Technology, 2017

This paper is concerned with a digital watermarking technique for color images based on directional transforms. Different from the traditional watermarking schemes which embed the watermarks into the spatial domain or frequency domain of the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), this paper investigates the performance of the watermarking schemes using the Fast Discrete Curvelet Transforms (FDCT) and Contourlet Transform (CT). We evaluate the performance of the watermarking schemes using the directional transforms on a standard database of color images in terms of invisibility and robustness. The performance metrics are measured by Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Normalized Correlation (NC), Structural SIMilarity (SSIM) and required time for extracting and embedding process. The experimental results reveal that watermarking schemes in the directional transform domains outperform the other schemes in DWT domains.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2013

The robustness of watermarks to geometric attacks is considered to be the most challenging design requirements for watermarks. Geometric attacks can desynchronize the location of the watermark and hence cause incorrect watermark detection. In this paper, a new color image watermarking scheme for copyright protection is proposed. It is based on embedding multiple watermark bits into the luminance component or the blue component of a color image in discrete wavelet domain. The proposed scheme uses image normalization technique to reduce the effect of synchronization errors caused by geometric attacks such as rotation. The extraction process does not require the original image. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme successfully makes the watermark perceptually invisible as well as robust to common signal processing and some geometric attacks.

International Journal of Computer …, 2012

Research in the field of watermarking is flourishing providing techniques to protect copyright of intellectual property. Among the various methods that exploit the characteristics of the Human Visual System (HVS) for more secure and effective data hiding, wavelet-based watermarking techniques showed to be immune to attacks; adding the quality of robustness to protect the hidden message from third-party modifications. In this paper, we introduce a novel algorithm that applies a casting operation of a binary message onto the wavelet coefficients of colored images decomposed at multilevel resolution. In the extraction process, the original "unwatermarked" image is used to estimate the embedded bitstream. Experimental results showed the low distortion effect cased by the embedding strategy of the proposed method. Furthermore, the resultant watermarked-images proved high resistance to attacks such as Jpeg compression and normal image processing like sharpening, blurring as well as image filtering. More simulations were carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm in comparison to similar transform-domain techniques.

2011

Abstract In this paper, we propose a wavelet based watermarking system. The system use wavelet transform for red, green and blues channel independently. We use space-time coding for encoding the watermark message before data embedding. The bit-error-rate of recovered message is calculated. The embedding factor is selected in such a way that the host video maintains the same peak signal to noise ration with/without using space-time coding.

The burgeoning information transactions in the cyber world have necessitated the need of research aimed at developing different ways to secure the communication of digital multimedia documents like text, images, audio, and video; as they could be easily accessed, manipulated or tampered. A digital watermark is certain digital signal or a pattern embedded into the host document, such as an image or audio or video with a view to protect it. This paper suggests a new invisible digital watermarking scheme for color images based on the amalgamation of wavelet transform (SWT2) with singular value decomposition (SVD), and advanced encryption scheme (AES). In this new approach, standard watermark is embedded into the three color channels (R, G, B) of the host image in order to increase the robustness of the watermark. The proposed method embeds the watermark without affecting the visual quality of the host document and also allows for reasonable compromise between robustness and invisibility of watermark. This research is an extension of our earlier work on gray-scale image to embed a color watermark into a color host based on the singular vector domain for all channels of RGB color space.

2017 25th Signal Processing and Communications Applications Conference (SIU), 2017

In this work, a new image watermarking algorithm on colour images is proposed. The proposed algorithm divides a cover image into three colour bands of red, green and blue. Then the following tasks are done on all three channels separately. First, Each colour band is divided into patches of small sizes then the entropy of each patch is calculated. At this step a threshold is found based on the average entropy of all patches and following is applied to all patches which have entropy lower than the threshold. A wavelet representation of each patch are given by applying a discrete wavelet transform. Then Singular value decomposition, orthogonal-triangular decomposition, and a chirp z-transform are used to embed a watermark on the cover image. Several signal processing attacks are applied on watermarked images in order to robustness of the algorithm. The Proposed algorithm is compared with one conventional and two state-ofthe-art algorithms. Experimental results show superiority of the proposed algorithm compare with other algorithm in the area of image watermarking.