A Robust Blind Watermarking Scheme for Color Images Using Quaternion Fourier Transform

Abstract

With the advancement of image devices, massive image data are being generated exponentially, which indirectly leads to more copyright issues over the images. Image watermarking is an important method for copyright protection. Considering that color images dominate the real-world image data, designing copyright protection techniques specially for color images are very meaningful. In this paper, we propose a robust blind watermarking scheme for color images based on quaternion Fourier transform (QFT). After converting the color image data into QFT coefficients, we embed the watermark message into the four channels in QFT domain, to improve the embedding capacity and robustness. We also conduct experiment to investigate the performance of visual quality and robustness, by comparing with some other common signal transforms. The experimental results show that our scheme achieves a satisfactory performance.