Color Image Watermarking Technique Research Articles

New quantum color image watermarking technique (NQCIWT)

New quantum color image watermarking technique (NQCIWT)

Entropy based adaptive color image watermarking technique in $$YC_bC_r$$ color space

Entropy based adaptive color image watermarking technique in $$YC_bC_r$$ color space

A Novel Color Image Watermarking Method with Adaptive Scaling Factor Using Similarity-Based Edge Region

This study aimed to deal with three challenges: robustness, imperceptibility, and capacity in the image watermarking field. To reach a high capacity, a novel similarity-based edge detection algorithm was developed that finds more edge points than traditional techniques. The colored watermark image was created by inserting a randomly generated message on the edge points detected by this algorithm. To ensure robustness and imperceptibility, watermark and cover images were combined in the high-frequency subbands using Discrete Wavelet Transform and Singular Value Decomposition. In the watermarking stage, the watermark image was weighted by the adaptive scaling factor calculated by the standard deviation of the similarity image. According to the results, the proposed edge-based color image watermarking technique has achieved high payload capacity, imperceptibility, and robustness to all attacks. In addition, the highest performance values were obtained against rotation attack, to which sufficient robustness has not been reached in the related studies.

Contourlet and Gould Transforms for Hybrid Image Watermarking in RGB Color Images

The major intention of this work is to introduce a novel hybrid image watermarking technique for RGB color images. This hybrid watermarking algorithm uses two transforms such as Contourlet and Gould transform. The Contourlet transform is used as first stage while the Gould transform is used as second stage. In the watermark embedding phase, the R, G and B channels are transformed using Contourlet transform. The bandpass directional sub band coefficients of Contourlet transformed image are then divided into sub-blocks. The sub-blocks are then transformed using Gould transform and the watermark information is embedded on the initial coefficients of each sub-blocks. After the embedding of watermark, inverse of Gould and Contourlet are taken to obtain the watermarked image. The reverse operation is performed to extract the watermark. Results obtained from attack-based experimentation for checking robustness implicate the superiority of this method in comparison with conventional methods. Better values are obtained for Embedding Rate, Structural Similarity Index Metric (SSIM) and Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR).

A blind color image watermarking algorithm combined spatial domain and SVD

It has great significance for protecting the image copyright with color image digital watermarking technique, which needs the watermarking algorithm has high robustness, good imperceptibility and short running-time. A blind colour image watermarking algorithm combined spatial domain and singular value decomposition (SVD) is designed to protect the rightful ownership of color image in this paper. The theoretical principle combined SVD and spatial domain is first discussed and proposed in this paper. Based on the derived principle, the watermark information can be directly embedded into the maximum singular value (MSV) of the host image in the spatial domain by the new quantization index modulation with variable quantization step, and the embedded watermark information can be directly extracted from the MSV of the watermarked image block in the spatial domain with geometrical correction. The contributions of this paper include the following four points: (1) the relationship between the changed MSV of SVD and the average changed value of image pixel in the spatial domain is the first derived in this paper; (2) the presented method has the merits of both spatial-domain technique and transform-domain technique; (3) the relationships of each component of the color image are used to improve the invisibility and the geometrical correction of watermarked image is also adapted to further improve the robustness; and (4) this presented method overcomes the false-positive problem that existed in many watermarking methods based on SVD. Simulation results demonstrate the new presented color image watermarking technique has better imperceptibility, higher robustness and shorter running-time compared with some state-of-the-art methods.

Quaternion discrete fractional Krawtchouk transform and its application in color image encryption and watermarking

This paper extends the traditional discrete fractional Krawtchouk transform (DFrKT) with quaternion theory to quaternion discrete fractional Krawtchouk transform (QDFrKT) for the purpose of color image processing. Also, the implementation of QDFrKT is given from two points of view, i.e. direct computation and calculation with quaternion symplectic form. The detailed mathematical derivation together with definition and some properties of quaternion algebra are provided. In order to evaluate the applicability of the proposed QDFrKT method, two applications are investigated, including color image encryption and color image watermarking. For color image encryption, experiments are conducted on key sensitivity, histogram analysis, and noise attacks; while for color image watermarking, experiments are conducted on watermarking invisibility and the robustness on attacks of media filter, average filter, Gaussian filter, and geometric attacks. Moreover, with the imperfect decryption property of the encryption algorithm, a potential application of the encryption strategy for designing watermarking algorithm is discussed. The promising experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed QDFrKT based color image encryption and watermarking techniques.

Color image watermarking using spatio-chromatic complex Hadamard transform in sequency domain

PurposeWatermarking technique is one of the significant methods in which carrier signal hides digital information in the form of watermark to prevent the authenticity of the stakeholders by manipulating different coefficients as watermark in time and frequency domain to sustain trade-off in performance parameters. One challenging component among others is to maintain the robustness, to limit perceptibility with embedding information. Transform domain is more popular to achieve the required results in color image watermarking. Variants of complex Hadamard transform (CHT) have been applied for gray image watermarking, and it has been proved that it has better performance than other orthogonal transforms. This paper is aimed at analyzing the performance of spatio-chromatic complex Hadamard transform (Sp-CHT) that is proposed as an application of color image watermarking in sequency domain (SD).Design/methodology/approachIn this paper, color image watermarking technique is designed and implemented in SD using spatio-chromatic – conjugate symmetric sequency – ordered CHT. The color of a pixel is represented as complex number a*+jb*, where a* and b* are chromatic components of International Commission on Illumination (CIE) La*b* color space. The embedded watermark is almost transparent to human eye although robust against common signal processing attacks.FindingsBased on the results, bit error rate (BER) and peak signal to noise ratio are measured and discussed in comparison of CIE La*b* and hue, saturation and value color model with spatio-chromatic discrete Fourier transform (Sp-DFT), and results are also analyzed with other discrete orthogonal transforms. It is observed from BER that Sp-CHT has 8%–12% better performance than Sp-DFT. Structural similarity index has been measured at different watermark strength and it is observed that presented transform performs better than other transforms.Originality/valueThis work presents the details and comparative analysis of two orthogonal transforms as color image watermarking application using MATLAB software. A finding from this study demonstrates that the Complex Hadamard transform is the competent candidate that can be replaced with DFT in many signal processing applications.

Watermarking Scheme for using YCbCr Based On 2-Level DWT

Multimedia data for both personal and commercial purposes is now accessible to everyone due to the rapid development of the Internet. Consequently, the issue of copyright protection has surfaced and has triggered the development of several techniques for multimedia copyright protection. Such techniques include digital watermarking in which the important information contained in the host media is concealed by embedment in carriers such as images, videos, or audios. In this paper, the adaptive color image watermarking technique is proposed for the satisfaction of both imperceptibility and robustness demands. There are two main stages involved in this technique – coding/embedding and decoding/extraction. Prior to the coding stage, imperceptibility and robustness are preserved by first converting the host image from RGB to YCbCr color space before selecting the Cb component to apply the DWT embedding technique. Once more, the selected quadrant of the hosted image is decomposed using DWT before extracting the watermarked image. The robustness and efficiency of this technique were proved by exposing the watermarked image to six types of attacks, namely Median filter, Gaussian noise, Sharpening filter, Salt & Pepper Noise, JPEG Compression, and Rotation. The results of the study were benchmarked against other methods that deploy DST on the same images. From the benchmarking process, the proposed algorithm was found to withstand the six types of attacks earlier mentioned and achieved a better performance compared to the DST approach. The quality of the watermarked image was also preserved in the proposed method.

Performance analysis of SMRT-based color image watermarking in different color spaces

ABSTRACT Watermarking is a generic strategy for overcoming numerous issues associated with multimedia security and digital rights management. The color image digital watermarking has not been given considerable attention, and there exists many applications that require them for copyright protection. An image-watermarking scheme based on Sequency based MRT (SMRT) for color image is proposed in this paper to achieve this goal. Choosing a color space for watermarking has always been a big question, as there are a number of color spaces. Primary objective is to find a better color space under the same method from among the frequently used color spaces. In the embedding phase, grayscale image watermark is embedded in the SMRT of R component of the cover image. Scaling factor is varied from 0.01 to 0.5 for evaluating performance of the methodology using PSNR, MSE, SSIM, IEM and NC. Performance of color image watermarking technique using SMRT in nine color spaces is analyzed. It is observed that embedding watermark in Cb channel of YCbCr color space is more imperceptible and robust compared to other color spaces considered. Simulation results show significant improvement in terms of imperceptibility. The robustness is high against GN attack as compared to other attacks.

A Feature-Based Fragile Watermarking of Color Image for Secure E-Government Restoration

this research developed a method using fragile watermarking technique for color images to achieve secure e-government tamper detection with recovery capability. Before performing the watermark insertion process, the RGB image is converted first into YCbCr image. The watermark component is selected from the image feature that approximates the original image, in which the chrominance value features as a watermark component. For a better detection process, 3-tuple watermark, check bits, parity bits, and recovery bits are selected. The average block in each 2 x 2 pixels is selected as 8 restoration bits of each component, the embedding process work on the pixels by modifying the pixels value of three Least Significant Bit (LSB) . The secret key for secure tamper detection and recovery, transmitted along with the watermarked image, and the algorithm mixture is used to extract information at the receiving end. The results show remarkably effective to restore tampered image.

Three Levels Dwt Watermarking Technique for Color Images and Watermarks

This paper presents a three-levels Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) watermarking technique for color images and watermarks. The proposed technique utilizes embedding the RGB watermark information into the Y channel of the YCbCr cover image. A pre-processor is used to convert the color watermark from RGB to a binary sequence. The pre-processed output is, then, inserted several times into the Y channel of the YCbCr cover image by changing the LL3 DWT coefficients. The robustness of the proposed scheme is verified through the ability to resist several classical attacks such as scaling, cropping, JPEG compression, median filtering and low pass filtering. In addition, the proposed scheme does not need the original host image to recover the watermark; hence, the recovery method is blind. This paper also includes a qualitative comparison between the one-level and two-levels DWT.

A block-based secure and robust watermarking scheme for color images based on multi-resolution decomposition and de-correlation

This paper presents a block-based secure and robust watermarking technique for color images based on multi-resolution decomposition and de-correlation. The principal objective of the presented scheme is to simultaneously meet all the four requirements (robustness, security, imperceptibility, and capacity) of a good watermarking scheme. The contribution of this study is to basically achieve the four contradictory requirements that a good watermarking scheme must meet. To do so, different approaches are combined in a way that the four requirements are achieved. For instance, to obtain imperceptibility, the three color channels (red, green, and blue) are de-correlated using principal component analysis, and the first principal component (de-correlated red channel) is chosen for watermark embedding. Afterwards, to achieve robustness, the de-correlated channel is decomposed using a discrete wavelet transform (DWT), and the approximate band (the other three bands are kept intact to preserve the edge information) is further decomposed into distinct blocks. The random blocks are chosen based on a random generated key. The random selected blocks are further broken down into singular values and vectors. Based on the mutual dependency on singular values and vectors’ matrices, the values are modified depending on the watermarking bits, and their locations are saved and used as another key, required when the watermark is to be extracted. Consequently, two-level authentication levels ensure the security, and using both singular values and vectors increases the capacity of the presented scheme. Moreover, the involvement of both left and right singular vectors along with singular values in the watermarking embedding process strengthens the robustness of the proposed scheme. Finally, to compare the presented scheme with the state-of-the-art schemes in terms of imperceptibility (peak signal-to-noise ratio and structural similarity index), security (with numerous fake keys), robustness (normalized correlation and bit error rate), and capacity, the Gonzalez and Kodak datasets are used. The comparison shows significant improvement of the proposed scheme over existing schemes.

New Rapid and Robust Color Image Watermarking Technique in Spatial Domain

In this paper, a novel spatial domain color image watermarking technique is proposed to rapidly and effectively protect the copyright of the color image. First, the direct current (DC) coefficient of 2D-DFT obtained in the spatial domain is discussed, and the relationship between the change of each pixel in the spatial domain and the change of the DC coefficient in the Fourier transform is proved. Then, the DC coefficient is used to embed and extract watermark in the spatial domain by the proposed quantization technique. The novelties of this paper include three points: 1) the DC coefficient of 2D-DFT is obtained in the spatial domain without of the true 2D-DFT; 2) the relationship between the change of each pixel in the image block and the change of the DC coefficient of 2D-DFT is found, and; 3) the proposed method has the short running time and strong robustness. The experimental results on two publicly available image databases (CVG-UGR and USC-SIPI) have shown that the proposed method not only has satisfied the needs of invisibility but also has better performance in terms of robustness and real-time feature, which show the proposed method has both advantages of spatial domain and frequency domain.

Color Image Watermarking with Watermark Authentication against False Positive Detection Using SVD

With growing need of exchanging digital information, digital watermarking has been an important tool to help content creators prove ownership if there is any dispute arising due to copyrights infringement. Robustness, imperceptibility and security are most imperative attributes for any efficient watermarking scheme. This requires the embedded watermark to be resilient and retrievable even if the content undergoes one or more signal processing operations, in part or as a whole. Some common image processing operations to be tackled are compression, noise addition, rotation, filtering, geometric distortions, scaling, etc. This paper presents a color image watermarking technique based on Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to eliminate false positive detection of watermark. In this paper, either of the two copies of digital signature of the Eigen-vectors of the claimed watermark is used to authenticate itself before using it for extraction. The color image is represented in Hue, Saturation and Value (HSV) model. The watermark and its signature is inserted in 1-level and 4-level DWT coefficients respectively, of the value component of the colored image. Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) of 55.3968 dB is achieved for the color Lena image and the watermark image is recovered with Correlation Coefficient (CC) as 0.9197.

Non-blind Arnold scrambled hybrid image watermarking in YCbCr color space

Due to fast technological development, human beings generally depend upon computer and other digital equipments in different areas of concern/applications. Therefore, various issues related to authentication and information security are raised with multimedia content in defence as well as in civil arena. In present work, a non-blind Arnold scrambling incorporated hybrid image watermarking technique has been proposed to improve the security and robustness. Here, color image as a watermark has been used instead of binary or gray image. To enhance the correlation between original host/cover and watermarked image, YCbCr color model has been chosen to separate channels of RGB image. Y channel has been used for embedding the singular values of watermark into the corresponding value of host/cover image using variable scaling factor (α). For more security aspect, number of iterations in Arnold transform have been included as a key for scrambling the watermark image prior to its embedding. Present work requires the original image for extraction of watermark hence the proposed work comes into the non-blind category. To calculate the imperceptibility, fidelity parameters such as; peak signal- to- noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity (SSIM) have been chosen whereas normalized correlation coefficient (NCC) have been used to calculate the similarity between original and extracted watermark. For robustness check, the proposed technique has also been tested against various attacks. The simulated results have also been compared with some of the existing color image watermarking techniques. The experimental outcomes prove the usefulness of the proposed image watermarking technique.

Robust hybrid watermarking techniques for different color imaging systems

Digital watermarking is an efficient and promising mechanism for protecting the copyright of the transmitted multimedia information. Thus, this paper presents two robust hybrid color image watermarking techniques. The objective of the proposed watermarking techniques is to increase the immunity of the watermarked color images against attacks and to achieve adequate perceptual quality. The first proposed hybrid technique is the homomorphic transform based Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) in Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) domain. Firstly, the DWT is employed to divide an image into non-overlapping bands. Then, the reflectance components of the LL sub-bands are extracted using the homomorphic transform of each of the RGB (Red, Green, and Blue) color image components. After that, the watermark is embedded by applying the SVD on these reflectance components. The second proposed hybrid technique is the three-level Discrete Stationary Wavelet Transform (DSWT) in Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) domain. In this technique, the RGB components of the host color image are separated, and then the DCT is applied on each separated color component. The three-level DSWT is employed to divide the DCT components into four sub-bands. These sub-bands are the A, H, V, and D matrices, which have the same host image size. The watermark image is then embedded into the determined matrix A. The two proposed hybrid watermarking techniques are compared with the current state-of-the-art techniques. This paper also presents a comparative study of the proposed techniques for different color imaging systems to determine their robustness and stability. The comparisons are based on the subjective visual results to detect any degradation in the watermarked image in addition to the objective results of the Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) of the watermarked image, and the Normalized Correlation (NC) of the extracted watermark to test and evaluate the performance efficiency of the proposed watermarking techniques. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed hybrid watermarking techniques are both robust and have adequate immunity against different types of attacks compared to the traditional watermarking techniques. They achieve not only very good perceptual quality with appreciated PSNR values, but also high correlation coefficient values in the presence of different multimedia attacks.

An Efficient Digital Watermarking Technique for Color Images Using Directional Transforms

This paper is concerned with a digital watermarking technique for color images based on directional transforms. Different from the traditional watermarking schemes which embed the watermarks into the spatial domain or frequency domain of the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), this paper investigates the performance of the watermarking schemes using the Fast Discrete Curvelet Transforms (FDCT) and Contourlet Transform (CT). We evaluate the performance of the watermarking schemes using the directional transforms on a standard database of color images in terms of invisibility and robustness. The performance metrics are measured by Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Normalized Correlation (NC), Structural SIMilarity (SSIM) and required time for extracting and embedding process. The experimental results reveal that watermarking schemes in the directional transform domains outperform the other schemes in DWT domains.

Robust color image watermarking technique in the spatial domain

This paper proposes a new blind watermarking algorithm, which embedding the binary watermark into the blue component of a RGB image in the spatial domain, to resolve the problem of protecting copyright. For embedding watermark, the generation principle and distribution features of direct current (DC) coefficient are used to directly modify the pixel values in the spatial domain, and then four different sub-watermarks are embedded into the different areas of the host image for four times, respectively. When watermark extraction, the sub-watermark is extracted with blind manner according to DC coefficients of watermarked image and the key-based quantization step, and then the statistical rule and the method of “first to select, second to combine” are proposed to form the final watermark. Hence, the proposed algorithm is executed in the spatial domain rather than in discrete cosine transform (DCT) domain, which not only has simple and quick performance of the spatial domain but also has high robustness feature of DCT domain. The experimental results show that the proposed watermarking algorithm can obtain better invisibility of watermark and stronger robustness for common attacks, e.g., JPEG compression, cropping, and adding noise. Comparison results also show the advantages of the proposed method.

A Novel Secure and Robust Image Watermarking Method Based on Decorrelation of Channels, Singular Vectors, and Values

A novel secure and robust image watermarking technique for color images is presented in this paper. Besides robustness and imperceptibility (which are the most important requisites of ...

Comparative Performance Analysis of Secured LWT-SVD Based Color Image Watermarking Technique in YUV, YIQ and YCbCr Color Spaces

this paper the perceptual quality and robustness in LWT domain and DWT domain is evaluated for the gray-scale image. The proposed technique is based on Lifting Wavelet Transform and Discrete Wavelet Transform (LWT-SVD) domain for embedding the gray-scale image to the color host image. Fibonacci-Lucas Transform is used to scramble the watermark image for security reason. YUV, YIQ and YCbCr color spaces are evaluated by implementing this secured robust algorithm. Y, U, V, I, Q, Cb and Cr channels are examined for the perceptual quality and robustness. Maximum recorded PSNR for V channel is 90.6039 and up to 65.5971 for Y channel in YCbCr color space. Maximum NC is recorded in Y channel for all the color spaces. Applied various attacks like Average filter, Gaussian filter, Gaussian Noise, Salt & pepper noise, Blur, Motion Blur, Crop, JPEG Compress, Rotate, etc. to the proposed technique to test all the channels of the different color spaces.