Copyright protection of color images for android-based smartphones using watermarking with quick-response code

In this paper, a color image watermarking scheme for copyright protection is proposed and designed to be implemented for Android-based smartphones. Characteristic-based image watermarking techniques were modified and made suitable for power limited smartphones. The security features were improved through implementing image scrambling on the watermark prior to embedding into the DWT domain. The features of the QR codes, including the high capacity and error correction capabilities, were exploited and employed. The QR codes were used as the watermarks to carry the ownership information. The proposed scheme was robust against JPEG compression with about 60-70% compression ratio and it resists noise attacks at noisy image quality with PSNR = 15-35 dB. Moreover, robustness against various malicious attacks was achieved including image cropping, object replacement, etc. An Android application has been developed, based on the proposed scheme, to demonstrate the capabilities of this study.