Robust spatial watermarking technique for colour images via direct saturation adjustment

Most colour watermarking methods are realised by modifying the image luminance or by processing each component of colour space separately. This paper presents a novel and robust colour watermarking approach for applications in copy protection and digital archives. The proposed scheme considers chrominance information that can be utilised at information embedding. This work presents an approach for hiding the watermark into DC components of the colour image directly in the spatial domain, followed by a saturation adjustment technique performed in RGB space. The merit of the proposed approach is that it not only provides promising watermarking performance but also is computationally efficient. Experimental results demonstrate that this scheme successfully makes the watermark perceptually invisible and robust to image processing operations such as general image processing operations (JPEG2000, JPEG-loss compression, lowpass filtering, and medium filtering), image scaling and image cropping.