Adaptive Robust Watermarking for Color Images

Digital images are widely used nowadays, carrying a great deal of information. However, copyright infringement of digital images occurs from time to time which poses a threat to the rights and interests of copyright owners and the security of information content. To deal with such problems, in this paper, we propose an adaptive robust watermarking scheme to protect the copyright of color digital images. Spread spectrum watermark and two kinds of synchronization information are embedded in the luminance and chrominance channels of the color image, respectively. The synchronization information helps to restore geometric distortions. We also design a pre-quantization strategy to mitigate the distortions caused by social platforms. To achieve better imperceptibility, we propose an adaptive strategy based on the peculiarities of Human Visual System to adjust the strength of watermark residuals. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is equipped with comprehensive and balanced robustness against common image processing, geometric distortions, unknown processing from social platforms and keeps the watermarked images with excellent imperceptibility simultaneously.