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Robust and secure zero-watermarking algorithm for color images based on majority voting pattern and hyper-chaotic encryption

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Abstract

Robust zero-watermarking is an effective and distortion-free technique for copyright protection and has become a research hotspot in the field of digital watermarking. In the face of weak robustness and security of existing schemes, this paper presents a novel robust and secure color image zero-watermarking algorithm based on majority voting pattern and hyper-chaotic encryption. In the proposed algorithm, firstly an original color image is decomposed by one-level discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and the corresponding low-frequency components of three channels are partitioned into blocks. Then, to resist strong attacks, we construct a distinguishable robust binary feature matrix extracted from all blocks and color components by using a combination of Frobenius norm in the singular value decomposition (SVD) domain and majority voting pattern. To promote security, a binary copyright logo is confused and diffused by hyper-chaotic Lorenz system. Finally, it performs a bitwise exclusive-or operation on the binary feature matrix and the encrypted copyrighted logo to obtain a zero-watermark signal. Experimental results indicate that in addition to the high-level security, the proposed zero-watermarking algorithm also has a stronger robustness against common geometric and non-geometric attacks, including rotation, scaling, filtering, JPEG compression and noise addition, compared with some existing typical zero-watermarking and traditional watermarking methods.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Scientific Research Program Funded by Shaanxi Provincial Education Department (Program No.15JK1504) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61671374, 61671376, 61771386).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Science, Faculty of Printing, Packaging Engineering and Digital Media Technology, Xi’an University of Technology, Xi’an, Shaanxi, 710048, China

    Xiao-bing Kang, Guang-feng Lin, Ya-jun Chen, Fan Zhao, Er-hu Zhang & Cui-ning Jing

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  1. Xiao-bing Kang
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  2. Guang-feng Lin
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  3. Ya-jun Chen
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  4. Fan Zhao
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Correspondence to Xiao-bing Kang.

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Kang, Xb., Lin, Gf., Chen, Yj. et al. Robust and secure zero-watermarking algorithm for color images based on majority voting pattern and hyper-chaotic encryption. Multimed Tools Appl 79, 1169–1202 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-019-08191-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-019-08191-y

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