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A novel robust color image watermarking method using RGB correlations

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Abstract

In order to protect the copyright of the color image, a novel robust color image watermarking method using correlations of RGB channels is presented. RGB three channels of the color image have much strong correlations, which are stable under various image attacks, and thus these correlations can be mined to embed watermark for robustness. In order to keep RGB correlations and chrominance perception, the color image is considered as the third-order tensor, and tucker decomposition is employed to operate on the color image. At first, Tucker decomposition is used to generate the first feature image, which includes the most of image energies and correlations between three channels. Then, the first feature image is divided into non-overlap blocks, and the singular value decomposition (SVD) is used to decompose the block to compute the left-singular matrix. Finally, the stable coefficients relationship of the left-singular matrix is modified to embed watermark for obtaining the robustness. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms other existing color image watermarking methods, which can resist JPEG compression, salt & pepper noise, median filtering, scaling, blurring, low-pass filtering, and so on attacks.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 61501270, 61671258, 61871247, Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No.LY19F020009, National High-tech R&D Program of China under Grant No. 2015AA015901. It was also sponsored by the K. C. Wong Magna Fund in Ningbo University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Science and Technology, Ningbo University, Ningbo, 315000, China

    Fangyan Zhang, Ting Luo & Haiyong Xu

  2. Faculty of Information Science and Engineering, Ningbo University, Ningbo, 315211, China

    Fangyan Zhang, Gangyi Jiang, Mei Yu & Haiyong Xu

  3. School of Information and Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University of Science and Technology, Hangzhou, 310027, China

    Wujie Zhou

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  1. Fangyan Zhang
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  2. Ting Luo
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  3. Gangyi Jiang
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  4. Mei Yu
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  5. Haiyong Xu
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Correspondence to Ting Luo.

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Zhang, F., Luo, T., Jiang, G. et al. A novel robust color image watermarking method using RGB correlations. Multimed Tools Appl 78, 20133–20155 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-019-7326-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-019-7326-9

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