A New JPEG Resistant Color Image Watermarking Algorithm Based on Quantization Index Modulation

A new color image watermarking algorithm with resistance to JPEG lossy compression based on quantization index modulation (QIM) is proposed in this paper. As it is known, QIM method can achieve a good balance between the embedding bit rate, robustness and distortion between the original image and the composited image by modulating the source signal into different clusters. The corresponding DCT coefficients margins of any two color channels selected from the three as the source signal is substantiated could achieve a high level embedding robustness and a low level distortion in this paper. However, JPEG lossy compression could bring a destructive influence to the watermark since it discards pretty much image information. In this paper, a compensation function is designed to correct the errors caused by JPEG compression. Experiments show the algorithm proposed has a good performance to resist the high compression ratio JPEG lossy compression and other attacks.