Colour Image Blind Watermarking Scheme Based on Fast Walsh Hadamard Transform and Hessenberg Decomposition

Colour image watermarking has become one of the most important algorithms for copyright protection. The following paper will present an innovative scheme for watermarking blind colour images using the discrete wavelet transform (DWT), fast Walsh Hadamard transform (FWHT) and the Hessenberg decomposition as its basis. First, two-level DWT followed by FWHT are used to decompose the host image's red channel. Next, the FWHT coefficients are split into 4 x 4 non-overlapping blocks. Then, each selected block is decomposed using Hessenberg decomposition, where the first row, first column element of the upper Hessenberg matrix H is quantified to embed the watermark information. Peak signal-to-noise ratio, normalized cross-correlation and structural similarity index measure are used to evaluate the feasibility and the robustness. The experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed watermarking scheme is highly invisible with PSNR > 40 dB, for several watermarked colour images, with a capacity of 4096 bits and execution time of 0.7415s. The proposed watermarking scheme is also highly resistant to both common image processing and geometrical attacks such as filtering, JPEG2000, noise adding, cropping, scaling, blurring and sharpening, and others.