Robust and transparent watermarking scheme for colour images

Abstract

In this study, a robust and transparent watermarking scheme for colour images is proposed. The colour features for the human visual system are utilised to design the colour watermarking scheme. Through the exploitation of the perceptual redundancy of colour images, the proposed watermarking scheme is perceptually tuned to embed and detect the watermark in the perceptually significant sub-bands of luminance and chrominance components of colour images in the wavelet domain. The employment of the uniformity in the uniform colour space and the masking effect mainly due to local variations in luminance magnitude leads to that the perceptual redundancy of colour images can be measured. By using the estimated perceptual redundancy in the form of error visibility thresholds of wavelet coefficients of the colour image, high strength watermarks are invisibly embedded into coefficients of the host colour image for resisting compression and malicious attacks. Simulation results show that the estimation of perceptual redundancy is helpful to the design of the watermarking scheme for colour images. The performance in terms of robustness and transparency of the proposed watermarking scheme is superior to that of the existing scheme.