Effective Color image watermarking scheme using YCbCr color space and QR code

A digital image watermarking technique is proposed to hide the relevant information in color digital images. The image is converted from RGB color space to YCbCr color space. This enables the algorithm to exploit characteristics of the Human Visual System (HVS) for embedding the watermark. The scheme embeds the watermark information utilizing wavelets transforms and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) for this purpose. It uses a Quick Response (QR) code as the watermark. The QR code is a robust code from which embedded information can be extracted even if the retrieved QR code image is distorted. Thus the proposed technique employs a judicious combination of different algorithmic ideas including altered YCbCr color space, transformation into wavelet domain, SVD for selection of places to embed and QR codes for enhanced robustness. The watermarking scheme proposed is robust against various signal processing attacks (e.g. filtering, compression, noise addition etc.) as well as geometric attacks (e.g. rotation, cropping etc.). Computational experiments on a variety of cover images show that embedding QR code is more effective than the other watermarks in terms of better information carrying capacity, robustness and imperceptibility. The proposed scheme is novel and effective as it simultaneously provides advantages of each of the individual elements combined in this approach.