Image watermarking against color blind image correction

Color blind people cannot see all color shades in images the same way as ordinary people. To solve this problem, color blind image correction is applied to an image to adjust its color shades for visual improvement purpose. In image watermarking applications, a watermark embedded within such image can be partially or fully damaged. In this paper, we thus propose a color image watermarking robust against a color blind image correction. In the watermark embedding process, a watermark is embedded into the medium color component in the Long, Medium and Short wavelengths (LMS) color space of a host image. The strength of watermark is adjusted in accordance with the luminance component from the same color space. In the watermark extraction process, the original M color component is estimated by exploiting relationship of the watermarked components within a local area around the embedded bit's position. The quality of watermarked image and the accuracy of extracted watermark are assessed in terms of weighted peak signal-to-noise ratio and normal correlation, respectively. The experimental results demonstrate the robustness of the proposed watermarking method against the most common color blind image correction technique called image recoloring.