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An improved color image watermarking algorithm based on QR decomposition

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Abstract

Most of the existing color image watermarking schemes use binary or grayscale image as watermark, and many of them belong to non-blind watermarking methods. In this paper, an improved color image watermarking algorithm based on QR decomposition is proposed to embed color watermark image into color host image. For embedding watermark, the 24-bits color host image is divided into non-overlapping 3 × 3 pixel blocks and each pixel block is decomposed by QR decomposition, and the 24-bits color watermark image is embedded into the color host image by modifying the relation between the second row first column coefficient and the third row first column coefficient of the orthogonal matrix Q. For extracting watermark, only the watermarked image is needed. Experimental results show that the proposed color image scheme not only has better watermark performance such as invisibility, robustness, security, capacity, and computation complexity, but also overcomes the false-positive detection problem.

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Acknowledgments

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 Shandong Province (ZR2014FM005, ZR2013FL008), Shandong Province Higher Educational Science and Technology Program (J14N20), Doctoral Foundation of Ludong University (LY2014034), Shandong Province Science and Technology Plan Projects (2014GGB01944) 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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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Science and Engineering, Ludong University, 264025, Shandong, China

    Qingtang Su, Gang Wang, Xiaofeng Zhang & Gaohuan Lv

  2. School of Computer & Software, Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, 210044, Nanjing, China

    Beijing Chen

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  1. Qingtang Su
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  2. Gang Wang
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  3. Xiaofeng Zhang
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  4. Gaohuan Lv
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  5. Beijing Chen
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Correspondence to Qingtang Su.

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Su, Q., Wang, G., Zhang, X. et al. An improved color image watermarking algorithm based on QR decomposition. Multimed Tools Appl 76, 707–729 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-015-3071-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-015-3071-x

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