A low-distortion QR Code watermarking scheme for digital color images robust to gamma correction attack

The use of Internet and new technologies have changed the way in which digital content is provided, unfortunately due to the ease with which such data can be copied and modified, the illegal copying of digital content has been notably increased. This problem has created the need to protect digital content to avoid the illegal use and handling of such information. The watermarking is one of the most popular technologies focused on copyright protection. This technique involves inserting a message that contains information about the copyright owner. An alternative for storing this information is the use of QR Codes (Quick Response Codes) whose maximum symbol size can encoding 4296 alphanumeric data. This paper presents a Rational Dither Modulation based watermarking scheme for QR code embedding into color images. Each watermarked image was measured with the PSNR, SSIM and MSE. Results showed that the obtained values of the used measured were into the valid ranges. Also, the proposed scheme shows robustness to gamma correction attack.