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A blind double color image watermarking algorithm based on QR decomposition

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Abstract

In this paper, a novel blind image watermarking scheme based on QR decomposition is proposed to embed color watermark image into color host image, which is significantly different from using the binary or gray image as watermark. When embedding watermark, the 24-bits color host image with size of 512 × 512 is divided into non-overlapping 4 × 4 pixel blocks and each pixel block is decomposed by QR. Then, according to the watermark information and the relation between the second row first column coefficient and the third row first column coefficient in the unitary matrix Q, the 24-bits color watermark image with size of 32 × 32 is embedded into the color host image. In addition, the new element compensatory method is used in the upper-triangle matrix R for reducing the visible distortion. When extracting watermark, only the watermarked image is needed. Compared with other SVD-based methods, the proposed method does not have the false-positive detection problem and has lower computational complexity, that is, the average running time of the proposed method only needs 1.481403 s. The experimental results show that the proposed method is robust against most common attacks including JPEG compression, JPEG 2000 compression, low-pass filtering, cropping, adding noise, blurring, rotation, scaling and sharpening et al. Compared with some related existing methods, the proposed algorithm has stronger robustness and better invisibility.

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Acknowledgments

The research was partially supported by NNSF from China (61074041, 61170161), the ‘Twelve Five-Year’ plan major projects supported by National Science and Technology Committee (2011BAD20B01) and the Plan Project of Shandong Province Science and Technology Development Committee (2011YD01079). The authors would like to thank anonymous referees for their valuable comments and suggestions which lead to substantial improvements of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Science and Engineering, Lu Dong University, Yantai, 264025, Shandong, People’s Republic of China

    Qingtang Su, Hailin Zou, Yongsheng Zhao & Tao Yao

  2. Key Laboratory of Advanced Control and Optimization for Chemical Process, Ministry of Education, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, 200237, People’s Republic of China

    Qingtang Su & Yugang Niu

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  1. Qingtang Su
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  2. Yugang Niu
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  3. Hailin Zou
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  4. Yongsheng Zhao
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  5. Tao Yao
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Correspondence to Qingtang Su.

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Su, Q., Niu, Y., Zou, H. et al. A blind double color image watermarking algorithm based on QR decomposition. Multimed Tools Appl 72, 987–1009 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-013-1653-z

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