A New PCA Based Hybrid Color Image Watermarking Using Cycle Spinning - Sharp Frequency Localized Contourlet Transform for Copyright Protection

Abstract

Hybrid watermarking techniques are gaining importance in the field of image watermarking as they meet criterions like Imperceptibility and Robustness. A novel approach for the hybrid color image watermarking using Cycle Spinning based Sharp Frequency Localized Contourlet Transform (CS-SFLCT) and Principal Component Analysis is proposed. Contourlet Transform (CT) is applied to decompose the images into various sub bands for all the color spaces of both the host and water mark images. For inclusion operation principal components of middle band(X bands) are considered and CS-SFLCT is chosen for watermarking. CS-SFLCT provides better frequency localization resulting in a very good PSNR and Principal Component’s helps in fruitful extraction of watermark from the host image. This hybrid technique has shown better correlation between input watermark and extracted one and shown very high very high robustness under various intentional and non intentional attacks.