A Robust Color Image Watermarking Algorithm Based on APDCBT and SSVD

Abstract

With the wide application of color images, watermarking for the copyright protection of color images has become a research hotspot. In this paper, a robust color image watermarking algorithm based on all phase discrete cosine biorthogonal transform (APDCBT) and shuffled singular value decomposition (SSVD) is proposed. The host image is transformed by the 8 × 8 APDCBT to obtain the direct current (DC) coefficient matrix, and then, the singular value decomposition (SVD) is performed on the DC matrix to embed the watermark. The SSVD and Fibonacci transform are mainly used at the watermark preprocessing stage to improve the security and robustness of the algorithm. The watermarks are color images, and a color quick response (QR) code with error correction mechanism is introduced to be a watermark to further improve the robustness. The watermark embedding and extraction processes are symmetrical. The experimental results show that the algorithm can effectively resist common image processing attacks, such as JPEG compression, Gaussian noise, salt and pepper noise, average filter, median filter, Gaussian filter, sharpening, scaling attacks, and a certain degree of rotation attacks. Compared with the color image watermarking algorithms considered in this paper, the proposed algorithm has better performance in robustness and imperceptibility.