Multichannel color image watermark detection utilizing vector-based hidden Markov model

Abstract

Multimedia data piracy in the Internet is a growing problem, since it provides easy and fast data transmission. Watermarking is regarded as a solution to restrain unauthorized duplication or distribution data. Image watermarking research mostly focuses on grayscale images with an extension to color images. However, most of these techniques ignore dependencies between color channels. In view of this, in this work, a multichannel color image watermarking technique and its corresponding detector in the wavelet domain is proposed. The inter-channel dependencies between RGB channels and inter-scale dependencies of the wavelet coefficients of color image are taken into account by employing the vector-based hidden Markov model. We conduct experiment on a set of color images to assess the performance of the proposed watermark detector. The results show that the performance of the proposed detector is superior to that of the other detectors in terms of the imperceptibility of the embedded watermark and the detection rate. It is also shown that the proposed detector has better performance in presence or absence of different kinds of attacks in comparison to the other existing methods.