A blind DCT based color watermarking algorithm for embedding multiple watermarks

Multiple watermarking based techniques are receiving more attention in recent times for its wide variety of applications in different fields. To protect the copyright ownership and validate the authenticity of multiple owners, in this paper a color multiple watermarking method based on DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) and repetition code is proposed and simulated. Initially, green and blue components of color host image are selected for inserting multiple watermarks. Then, each green and blue component of the image is decomposed into non overlapping blocks and subsequently DCT is employed on each block. In this technique, a binary bit of watermark is embedded into green/blue component's transformed block by modifying some middle significant AC coefficients using repetition code. During multiple watermarks embedding in green and blue components of the proposed method, DC and some higher AC coefficients are kept intact after zigzag scanning of each DCT block to ensure the imperceptibility of the watermarked host image. The proposed scheme is experimented to establish the validity by extracting adequate multiple watermark data from the restructured cover image after applying common geometric transformation attacks (like rotation, cropping, scaling and deletion of lines/columns etc.), common enhancement technique attacks (like lowpass filtering, histogram equalization, sharpening, gamma correction, noise addition etc.) and JPEG compression attacks. (C) 2016 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.