A robust method for data hiding in color images

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a methodology for embedding watermark image data into color images. At the transmitter, the signature image is encoded by a multiple description encoder. The information of the two descriptions are embedded in the host image in the spatial domain in the red and blue components. Furthermore, this scheme requires no knowledge of the original image for the recovery of the signature image, yet yields high signal-to-noise ratios for the recovered output. At the receiver, the multiple description decoder combines the information of each description and reconstructs the original signature image. We experiment the proposed scheme for embedding a gray-scale signature image of 128×128 pixels size in the spatial domain of a color host image of 512×512 pixels. Simulation results show that data embedding based on multiple description coding has low visible distortions in the host image and robustness to various signal processing and geometrical attacks, such as addition of noise, quantization, cropping and down-sampling. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.