Digital Color Image–Adaptive Watermarking using Blind Source Separation

In a digital watermarking scheme, it is not convenient to carry the original image all the time in order to detect the owner’s signature from the watermarked image. Moreover, for those applications that require different watermark for different copies, it is preferred to utilize some kind of watermark-independent algorithm in extraction. This paper presents a digital color image watermarking scheme using Blind Source Separation to embed the watermark by manipulating the least significant levels of the blue channel of the host color image so as not to bring about a perceptible change in the marked image. The novelty of our scheme lies in determining the mixing matrix for BSS model, based on the smooth and textured metric based on energy content of the image. This makes our method image adaptive to embed color image into color images. Meanwhile the ICA (Independent Component Analysis) algorithm is introduced in extraction procedure, through which the watermark can be derived efficiently. The proposed method, undergoing different experiments, has shown its robustness against many attacks.