A Blind Adaptive Color Image Watermarking Scheme Based on Principal Component Analysis, Singular Value Decomposition and Human Visual System

Abstract

A blind adaptive color image watermarking scheme based on principal component analysis, singular value decomposition, and human visual system is proposed. The use of principal component analysis to decorrelate the three color channels of host image, improves the perceptual quality of watermarked image. Whereas, human visual system and fuzzy inference system helped to improve both imperceptibility and robustness by selecting adaptive scaling factor, so that, areas more prone to noise can be added with more information as compared to less prone areas. To achieve security, location of watermark embedding is kept secret and used as key at the time of watermark extraction, whereas, for capacity both singular values and vectors are involved in watermark embedding process. As a result, four contradictory requirements; imperceptibility, robustness, security and capacity are achieved as suggested by results. Both subjective and objective methods are acquired to examine the performance of proposed schemes. For subjective analysis the watermarked images and watermarks extracted from attacked watermarked images are shown. For objective analysis of proposed scheme in terms of imperceptibility, peak signal to noise ratio, structural similarity index, visual information fidelity and normalized color difference are used. Whereas, for objective analysis in terms of robustness, normalized correlation, bit error rate, normalized hamming distance and global authentication rate are used. Security is checked by using different keys to extract the watermark. The proposed schemes are compared with state-of-the-art watermarking techniques and found better performance as suggested by results.