Abstract
This paper proposes a new blind watermarking algorithm, which embedding the binary watermark into the blue component of a RGB image in the spatial domain, to resolve the problem of protecting copyright. For embedding watermark, the generation principle and distribution features of direct current (DC) coefficient are used to directly modify the pixel values in the spatial domain, and then four different sub-watermarks are embedded into the different areas of the host image for four times, respectively. When watermark extraction, the sub-watermark is extracted with blind manner according to DC coefficients of watermarked image and the key-based quantization step, and then the statistical rule and the method of “first to select, second to combine” are proposed to form the final watermark. Hence, the proposed algorithm is executed in the spatial domain rather than in discrete cosine transform (DCT) domain, which not only has simple and quick performance of the spatial domain but also has high robustness feature of DCT domain. The experimental results show that the proposed watermarking algorithm can obtain better invisibility of watermark and stronger robustness for common attacks, e.g., JPEG compression, cropping, and adding noise. Comparison results also show the advantages of the proposed method.
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Acknowledgements
The research was partially supported by the Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions (PAPD), Jiangsu Collaborative Innovation Center on Atmospheric Environment and Equipment Technology (CICAEET), Natural Science Foundation of China (61202111, 61572258), Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province (ZR2014FM005), Key Science and Technology Plan Projects of Yantai City (2016ZH057), Department of Science and Technology of Shandong Province (2013GGB01231) and Shandong Province Important Research Plan Projects (2015GSF116001). The authors would like to thank anonymous referees for their valuable comments and suggestions which lead to substantial improvements of this paper.
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Su, Q., Chen, B. Robust color image watermarking technique in the spatial domain. Soft Comput 22, 91–106 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-017-2489-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-017-2489-7