Hybrid robust watermarking for color images

•Highly robust and blind color image watermarking scheme.•Only the person who has a valid secret key and a user-id can prove the rightful ownership of the image.•Impossible for any attacker to compute the secret key from the watermarked image.•Robustness is achieved by embedding the watermark in the contourlet domain.•Imperceptibility is achieved by embedding the watermark in less correlated sub bands.

In this paper, we present a blind and highly robust watermarking scheme method for color images by combining the advantages of both spatial and frequency domain. Watermark is generated for each channel (RGB) of the color image by extracting spatial domain features using Gray Level Co-occurence Matrix as well as a unique identification number. The watermark is embedded in Principal Component Analysis (PCA)-based less correlated low and high frequency sub bands in such a way that the perceptual quality of the image is preserved. Imperceptibility is achieved by embedding the watermark in less correlated sub bands and robustness is achieved by spreading the watermark using Laplacian Pyramid in contourlet transform. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can survive various image processing and signal processing attacks. The proposed method achieves high transparency, imperceptibility and robustness compared to some of the existing schemes.

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