Blind watermarking scheme for medical and non-medical images copyright protection using the QZ algorithm

Abstract

The widely used watermarking technique is to hide the watermark information through adding process, which means the watermark is added with the host image to realize embedding. The constraints of these addition-based watermarking systems mainly are non-blind, they are vulnerable to forgery attacks and have the false-positive problem. To solve these problems, a novel blind watermarking scheme based on the QZ algorithm for medical and normal images is first presented in this paper. In the presented scheme, we take the watermark and the host image as two inputs of the QZ algorithm to realize embedding, rather than the adding process. The outputs of the QZ algorithm include four parts: two upper quasitriangular matrices and two unitary matrices. Then the three parts of the outputs are synthesized by the vector synthesis and inverse discrete wavelet transform-singular value decomposition (DWT-SVD) to obtain the watermarked host image. Due to the characteristics of the QZ algorithm, our scheme is blind. The performance is tested and compared by applying our scheme to both medical and non-medical images. The experimental results show that our scheme is robust against various image-processing attacks, forgery attacks, and false-positive problem. And from the comparison results, the proposed scheme outperforms the existing addition-based schemes in terms of robustness against the Median filter, Low-pass filter, Gaussian blur attacks, and forgery attacks, while maintaining good invisibility.