Fan Beam Transform and LU Decomposition based Blind Watermarking Technique for Color Images

Abstract

AbstractThe copyright protection of digital multimedia data has been achieved tremendous growth in this internet era through the digital watermarking technique. This paper proposes a blind image watermarking technique using fan-beam transform (FBT) and lower–upper (LU) decomposition. Primarily, separate the color host image into the RGB color model and then the \(B\) component is processed with FBT to attain projection data. The \(B\) component is subdivided into \(4 \times 4\) non-overlapping blocks. The pseudo-random sequence algorithm is employed to choose the embedding blocks for accomplishing better security and robustness. Each selected block is processed using LU decomposition. The first row and fourth column element of the upper triangular matrix attained by LU decomposition is selected to embed the color watermark image because this element enriches the robustness and visual quality of the watermark. Furthermore, the Arnold scrambling is utilized for preprocessing the watermark to ensure its security. This scheme accomplishes good results for image quality and robustness by obtaining the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) value which ranges from 48.6880 to 50.4124 and high normalized cross-correlation (NCC).KeywordsDigital watermarkingFan-beam transformLU decompositionPseudo-random sequence algorithmArnold scrambling