Robust watermarking scheme for color image based on quaternion-type moment invariants and visual cryptography

This paper introduces a novel robust watermarking scheme for copyright protection of color image based on quaternion-type moment invariants and visual cryptography. As a secure way to allow secret sharing of images, visual cryptography realizes encryption of classified information and the decryption is performed through human visual system. The proposed scheme represents the color image into a quaternion matrix, so that it can deal with the multichannel information in a holistic way. Then the quaternion moments are applied to extract the invariant features, which are crucial to generate the master share. Together with the scrambled watermark, they are used for constructing the ownership share based on visual cryptography. Afterwards, the ownership share is registered and responsible for authentication. A set of experiments has been conducted to illustrate the validity and feasibility of the proposed scheme as well as better robustness against different attacks. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.