Color image ownership protection based on spectral domain watermarking using QR codes and QIM

Some watermarking authentication methods based on spectral domain using QR codes and Quantization Index Modulation (QIM) are proposed for ownership protection in color images. The QR code is created with the owners’ information and used as binary watermark sequence, which is permuted using Arnold Permutation to increase the security before embedding it. Once the watermark sequence is generated, the original color image is transformed from RGB to YCbCr color space where the Luminance Channel (Y) is processed by the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) to embed the binary watermark sequence using Quantization Index Modulation (QIM). The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.