A novel color image watermarking scheme in nonsampled contourlet-domain

Geometric distortion is known as one of the most difficult attacks to resist, for it can desynchronize the location of the watermark and hence causes incorrect watermark detection. It is a challenging work to design a robust color image watermarking scheme against geometric distortions. Based on the support vector regression (SVR) and nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT), we propose a new color image watermarking algorithm with good visual quality and reasonable resistance toward geometric distortions in this paper. Firstly, the geometrically invariant space is constructed by using color image normalization, and a significant region is obtained from the normalized color image by utilizing the invariant centroid theory. Then, the NSCT is performed on the green channel of the significant region. Finally, the digital watermark is embedded into host color image by modifying the low frequency NSCT coefficients, in which the HVS masking is used to control the watermark embedding strength. In watermark detection, according to the high correlation among different channels of the color image, the digital watermark can be recovered by using SVR technique. Experimental results show that the proposed color image watermarking is not only invisible and robust against common image processing operations such as filtering, noise adding, and JPEG compression etc., but also robust against the geometrical distortions.