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Blind watermarking scheme based on Schur decomposition and non-subsampled contourlet transform

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Abstract

An invisibility and blind watermarking algorithm based on Schur decomposition and non-subsampled contourlet transform is designed to protect copyright. The cover image is decomposed by the non-subsampled contourlet transform. And the low pass sub-band of the non-subsampled contourlet transform is divided into 8 × 8 non-overlapping blocks. Then each block is performed by the Schur decomposition and the watermark information is embedded by modifying the largest energy element in the Schur domain. Before embedding into the cover image, the original watermark is scrambled with logistic map and Arnold transform to ensure the security. Besides, a synchronization mechanism based on scale invariant feature transform is designed for resisting geometrical attacks. The proposed watermarking algorithm is evaluated with structural similarity index, peak signal to noise ratio and bit error rate. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed watermarking scheme performs better in terms of invisibility, robustness and payload than other similar schemes.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 61172159), and the Research Foundation of the Education Department of Heilongjiang Province (grant nos. 12531767 and 12541872).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information & Communication Engineering, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin, 150001, China

    Jing-You Li & Chao-Zhu Zhang

  2. School of Communication & Electronic Engineering, Qiqihar University, Qiqihar, 161006, China

    Jing-You Li

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  1. Jing-You Li
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  2. Chao-Zhu Zhang
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Correspondence to Jing-You Li.

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Li, JY., Zhang, CZ. Blind watermarking scheme based on Schur decomposition and non-subsampled contourlet transform. Multimed Tools Appl 79, 30007–30021 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-020-09389-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-020-09389-1

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