Digital Color Images Ownership Authentication via Efficient and Robust Watermarking in a Hybrid Domain

We propose an efficient, imperceptible and highly robust digital watermarking scheme applied to color images for ownership authentication purposes. A hybrid domain for embedding the same watermark is used in this algorithm, which is composed by a couple of watermarking techniques based on spread spectrum and frequency domain. The visual quality is measured by three metrics called Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) and Visual Information Fidelity (VIF). The difference color between the original and watermarked image is computed using the Normalized Color Difference (NCD) measure. Experimentation shows that the proposed method provides high robustness against several geometric distortions including large image cropping, removal attacks, image replacement and affine transformation; signal processing operations including several image filtering, JPEG lossy compression, visual watermark added and noisy image, as well as combined distortions between all of them. Also, we present a comparison with some previously published methods which reported outstanding results and have a similar purpose that our proposal, i.e. they are focused in robust watermarking.

Keywords

Robust digital watermarking; ownership authentication; spread spectrum; discrete Fourier transform; discrete Contourlet transform.

Citation

Radioengineering. 2017 vol. 26, č. 2, s. 536-551. ISSN 1210-2512
https://www.radioeng.cz/fulltexts/2017/17_02_0536_0551.pdf

Document type

Peer-reviewed

Document version

Published version

Language of document

en

Document licence

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/