Zero-Watermarking Algorithm in Transform Domain Based on RGB Channel and Voting Strategy

A zero-watermarking algorithm in transform domain based on RGB channel and voting strategy is proposed. The registration and identification of ownership have achieved copyright protection for color images. In the ownership registration, discrete wavelet transform (DWT), discrete cosine transform (DCT), and singular value decomposition (SVD) are used comprehensively because they have the characteristics of multi-resolution, energy concentration and stability, which is conducive to improving the robustness of the proposed algorithm. In order to take full advantage of the characteristics of the image, we use three channels of R, G, and B of a color image to construct three master shares, instead of using data from only one channel. Then, in order to improve security, the master share is superimposed with the copyright watermark encrypted by the owner’s key to generate an ownership share. When the ownership is authenticated, copyright watermarks are extracted from the three channels of the disputed image. Then using voting decisions, the final copyright information is determined by comparing the extracted three watermarks bit by bit. Experimental results show that the proposed zero watermarking scheme is robust to conventional attacks such as JPEG compression, noise addition, filtering and tampering, and has higher stability in various common color images.