A novel non-blind watermarking scheme for color image using PCA transform and histogram matching technique

In this paper, a novel method is proposed for color image watermarking using PCA transform and histogram matching technique. First the color cover image is transformed into YUV from RGB space. Next, the luminance component(Y) is divided into non-overlapping blocks. Then, the values of each block are placed in the matrix data (X) and PCA transform will be applied to it. Finally, the watermark (grayscale image) is embedded into the first component of the PCA after histogram matching to it. Also the proposed method is compared to other methods in spatial domain. Our method is robust and increases the capacity of watermarking.