Image watermarking based on reflectance modification

Abstract

This paper proposes a spatial image watermarking method based on the modification of reflectance component of a color image. In the proposed method, the reflectance component is extracted from the YCbCr color space of the host image pixels, and used to carry a binary watermark image with the same size. Each embedded bit is blindly achieved based on the estimation of original watermarking component from the 3 × 3 watermarked components. The performance of the proposed method in terms of quality of watermarked image and accuracy of extracted watermark is evaluated and presented. Its robustness against image processing operations at various strengths is also evaluated and compared with the previous method.