Robust Dual-Color Watermarking Based on Quaternion Singular Value Decomposition

Abstract

This paper proposes a robust dual-color watermarking based on quaternion singular value decomposition (QSVD), which can embed large payloads into color images with low distortion, and can obtain strong robustness to process color image in a holistic manner. First, two notes are proposed for designing the proposed watermarking scheme, one of which is about three strong correlations found in U that can be used for watermark embedding, and the other is analyzing the feasibility of V compensation for QSVD-based watermarking scheme. In addition, a fast structure-preserving algorithm is used to calculate the singular value decomposition (SVD) of a quaternion matrix, which makes the procedure computationally more flexible and efficient. Then a new watermarking scheme is proposed to protect the copyright of color images. This scheme uses quaternion to make the color image channels correlated so that the proposed watermarking scheme has strong anti-attack performance. Experimental results show that the proposed dual-color watermarking is not only imperceptible but also robust to some common attacks, and the performance of the proposed method outperforms other methods considered in this work.

Keywords

• QSVD
• structure-preserving method
• image watermarking
• robustness