Blind Color Image Watermarking Using Fan Beam Transform and QR Decomposition

Abstract

Digital watermarking has been utilized effectively for copyright protection of multimedia contents. This paper suggests a blind symmetric watermarking algorithm using fan beam transform (FBT) and QR decomposition (QRD) for color images. At first, the original image is transferred from RGB to L*a*b* color model and FBT is applied to b* component. Then the b*component of the original image is split into m × m non-overlapping blocks and QRD is conducted to each block. Watermark data is placed into the selected coefficient of the upper triangular matrix using a new embedding function. Simulation results suggest that the presented algorithm is extremely robust against numerous attacks, and also yields watermarked images with high quality. Furthermore, it represents more excellent performance compared with the recent state-of-the-art algorithms for robustness and imperceptibility. The normalized correlation (NC) of the proposed algorithm varies from 0.8252 to 1, the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) varies from 54.1854 to 54.1892, and structural similarity (SSIM) varies from 0.9285 to 0.9696, respectively. In contrast, the NC of the recent state-of-the-art algorithms varies from 0.5193 to 1, PSNR varies from 38.5471 to 52.64, and SSIM varies from 0.9311 to 0.9663, respectively.