A DCT Domain Color Watermarking Scheme Based on Chaos and Multilayer Arnold Transformation

A novel DCT domain color digital watermarking scheme based on chaotic maps is proposed, and the host image is color RGB image. The color space of the color host image is first converted from RGB to YIQ. In order to resist JPEG compression, all three watermark RGB channel signals are buried to Y component of the YIQ color space host images. In the proposed method, the image watermark is embedded into low-band DCT coefficients with different strength according to the characteristics of human vision system. The watermark signal and the embedding position of the host image are encrypted respectively by the unified chaotic map and multilayer Arnold cat map, and compared with the general Arnold cat map, the key space is highly increased. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme possesses the invisibility and the robustness to common image processing attacks, such as noise addition, JPEG compression, image rotation, cutting and so on.