Contourlet Based Adaptive Watermarking for Color Images

Haohao SONG 

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems  Vol.E92-D  No.10  pp.2171-2174
Publication Date: 2009/10/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1361
Print ISSN: 0916-8532
Type of Manuscript: LETTER
Category: Image Processing and Video Processing
Keyword: 
contourlet,  image watermarking,  information security,  wavelet, 

Full Text: PDF(81KB)

Summary: 
This paper proposes a contourlet based adaptive watermarking for color images (CAWCI). A color image with RGB space is firstly converted to its YCbCr space equivalent; a luminance (Y) image and two chrominance (Cb and Cr) images are subsequently transformed into contourlet domain respectively; the watermark is embedded into the contourlet coefficients of the largest detail subbands of three images lastly. On the one hand, the embedded watermark is imperceptible because contrast sensitivity function and watermark visual mask are adopted in our CAWCI. On the other hand, the embedded watermark is very robust due to the spread specialty of Laplacian pyramid (LP) in contourlet transform. The corresponding watermarking detection algorithm is proposed to decide whether the watermark is present or not by exploiting the unique transform structure of LP. Experimental results show the validity of CAWCI in terms of both watermarking invisibility and watermarking robustness.