Digital watermarking for color images in hue-saturation-value color space

Abstract

This paper proposes a new watermarking scheme for color images, in which all pixels of the image are used for embedding watermark bits in order to achieve the highest amount of embedding. For watermark embedding, the S component in the hue-saturation-value (HSV) color space is used to carry the watermark bits, while the V component is used in accordance with a human visual system model to determine the proper watermark strength. In the proposed scheme, the number of watermark bits equals the number of pixels in the host image. Watermark extraction is accomplished blindly based on the use of a 3×3 spatial domain Wiener filter. The efficiency of our proposed image watermarking scheme depends mainly on the accuracy of the estimate of the original S component. The experimental results show that the performance of the proposed scheme, under no attacks and against various types of attacks, was superior to the previous existing watermarking schemes.