Multichannel watermarking of color images

In the field of image watermarking, research has been mainly focused on grayscale image watermarking, whereas the extension to the color case is usually accomplished by marking the image luminance, or by processing each color channel separately. In this paper, a DCT domain watermarking technique expressly designed to exploit the peculiarities of color images is presented. The watermark is hidden within the data by modifying a subset of full-frame DCT coefficients of each color channel. Detection is based on a global correlation measure which is computed by taking into account the information conveyed by the three color channels as well as their interdependency. To ultimately decide whether or not the image contains the watermark, the correlation value is compared to a threshold. With respect to existing grayscale algorithms, a new approach to threshold selection is proposed, which permits reducing the probability of missed detection to a minimum, while ensuring a given false detection probability. Experimental results, as well as theoretical analysis, are presented to demonstrate the validity of the new approach with respect to algorithms operating on image luminance only.