With the rapid development of internet technology, digital images are easily accessed and tampered by unauthorized users. Therefore, copyright of color images has become an important challenge in nowadays. Robust color image watermarking methods have emerged to provide copyright. However, robust watermarking methods must satisfy the requirements such as robustness, imperceptibility, capacity, and security. Therefore, researchers are focused on methods using grayscale watermark instead of the binary watermark to increase capacity. Grayscale watermark based robust color image watermarking methods are mostly semi-blind and non-blind. However, these methods have limited utilization areas since the original image, original watermark, or side information is required. To address these drawbacks, we propose a blind robust color image watermarking method using grayscale watermark. In the proposed watermark embedding procedure, one-level discrete wavelet transform is performed on the Cb color component. Then, scrambled watermark pixels are hidden into coefficients of 4 × 4 discrete cosine transform (DCT) matrices of LL subband by using dividing-based new watermark embedding formula. In the watermark extracting procedure, watermark pixels are extracted from coefficients of DCT matrices by using dividing-based extracting formula. The performance is demonstrated against various attacks and experimental results indicate that the presented method ensures robustness while preserving imperceptibility.
Image tamper detection and recovery has become an important issue in recent years. In order to detect and recover high tampering rated images, this paper presents a novel selfembedded fragile watermarking method with triple recovery information embedding approach. In this proposed method host image is divided into sixteen main blocks. Four partner blocks are selected from main blocks as a partner group using Look-Up table which is constructed for recovery against high tampering rated images. Each partner block is divided into 4 × 4 blocks. Recovery data of each partner block is generated from the mean values of the 4 × 4 blocks. Then, triple recovery information for each partner block is constructed by combining recovery data of the three other partner blocks. After the generation of the recovery information, each partner block is divided into 16 × 16 blocks. Then, these blocks are divided into four 8 × 8 sub-blocks. Recovery bits for each partner block are embedded into the first and second least significant bits (LSBs) of the first three sub-blocks. It means that triple copies of recovery information for each partner block are embedded into three other blocks in the image, which provides triple chance for recovery of the tampered areas. On the other hand, authentication information is generated from the pixels of the 16 × 16 recovery information embedded image blocks by using MD5 hash function. This authentication information is embedded into the quarter part of each 16 × 16 block by using LSB substitution. The performance of the proposed method has been demonstrated by applying different size of cropping attacks to the different areas of the watermarked images. Experimental results show that the proposed method satisfactory recovers up to 75% tampering rated images.
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