A Spatial Domain Quantum Watermarking Scheme**Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 61272514, 61170272, 61373131, 61121061, 61411146001, the program for New Century Excellent Talents under Grant No. NCET-13-0681, the National Development Foundation for Cryptological Research (Grant No. MMJJ201401012) and the Fok Ying Tung Education Foundation under Grant No. 131067, and the Shandong Provincial Natural Science

Abstract

This paper presents a spatial domain quantum watermarking scheme. For a quantum watermarking scheme, a feasible quantum circuit is a key to achieve it. This paper gives a feasible quantum circuit for the presented scheme. In order to give the quantum circuit, a new quantum multi-control rotation gate, which can be achieved with quantum basic gates, is designed. With this quantum circuit, our scheme can arbitrarily control the embedding position of watermark images on carrier images with the aid of auxiliary qubits. Besides reversely acting the given quantum circuit, the paper gives another watermark extracting algorithm based on quantum measurements. Moreover, this paper also gives a new quantum image scrambling method and its quantum circuit. Differ from other quantum watermarking schemes, all given quantum circuits can be implemented with basic quantum gates. Moreover, the scheme is a spatial domain watermarking scheme, and is not based on any transform algorithm on quantum images. Meanwhile, it can make sure the watermark be secure even though the watermark has been found. With the given quantum circuit, this paper implements simulation experiments for the presented scheme. The experimental result shows that the scheme does well in the visual quality and the embedding capacity.