Color image watermarking based on orientation diversity and color complexity

Abstract

The Just Noticeable Distortion (JND) can reliably measure the perceptual strength in image watermarking, but, it remains a challenge to computationally model the process of embedding watermark without prior knowledge of the image contents. This paper proposed a novel color image watermarking scheme in discrete cosine transform (DCT) domain based on JND, which takes both orientation diversity and color complexity features into account. Firstly, two indicator was introduced which take into account the differences in the texture types and orientation diversity of the Human Visual System (HVS) in the proposed JND contrast masking (CM) processing. In addition, a novel color complexity weight from Cb-channel is used to guarantee the scheme robustness. Then, a novel JND model combined with the proposed contrast masking and color complexity is applied into quantization watermarking scheme. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods for color image watermarking, experimental results using publicly available images show that our proposed scheme is reliable and effective.