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An improved color image watermarking scheme based on Schur decomposition

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Abstract

With the rapid development of computer technology, the copyright protection of color image is becoming a more and more urgent problem. In this paper, an improved color image blind watermarking scheme based on Schur decomposition is proposed, which is different from using the binary or gray-level image as watermark. By analyzing the 4 × 4 unitary matrix U and the upper triangular matrix D of Schur decomposition, it is found that not only the embedding column c of matrix U is decided by the column of the maximum eigenvalue of the matrix D, but also the entries between the second row the c-th column and the third row the c-th column in the matrix U have strong similarity. These properties will be used for embedding watermark and extracting watermark in the blind manner. The novelty of this paper includes: 1) Using the results features obtained by Schur decomposition to embed or extract watermark with blind manner; 2) The embedded watermark is color image which has more watermark information than random sequence, binary image or gray-level image. Experimental results show that the proposed watermarking algorithm has better performance, such as in the aspects of the invisibility, robustness, computational complexity, security, capacity etc., compared with other proposed methods considered in this work.

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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), NNSF from China (61602229, 61471185, 61403180, 61572258), Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province (ZR2014FM005, ZR2016FM21, ZR2016FM13), Shandong Province Higher Educational Science and Technology Program (J14LN20), Doctoral Foundation of Ludong University (LY2014034), Department of Science & Technology of Shandong Province (2013GGB01231, 2015GSF116001), Key Science and Technology Plan Projects of Yantai City (2016ZH057). 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, Shandong, 264025, China

    Qingtang Su

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

    Qingtang Su & Beijing Chen

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  1. Qingtang Su
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  2. Beijing Chen
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Correspondence to Qingtang Su.

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Su, Q., Chen, B. An improved color image watermarking scheme based on Schur decomposition. Multimed Tools Appl 76, 24221–24249 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-016-4164-x

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