Title: A novel colour image watermarking scheme based on Schur decomposition

Authors: Qingtang Su; Lin Su; Gang Wang; Leida Li; Jianting Ning

Addresses: School of Information and Electrical Engineering, Ludong University, 264025 Yantai, China ' College of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Shandong University of Science and Technology, 266590 Qingdao, China ' School of Information and Electrical Engineering, Ludong University, 264025 Yantai, China ' School of Information and Control Engineering, China University of Mining and Technology, 221116 Xuzhou, China ' School of Computer, National University of Singapore, 119077 Singapore, Singapore

Abstract: A novel colour image watermarking scheme based on Schur decomposition is proposed in this paper. By analysing the 3 × 3 unitary matrix U via Schur decomposition, the strong similarity relation between U_2,1 and U_3,1 is found. This relation will represent one kind of embedded watermark information, i.e., '1' or '0', and will be used to extract watermark from 3 × 3 unitary matrix U in the blind manner. Moreover, the proposed method requires lower computational complexity than other methods based on singular value decomposition (SVD) since Schur decomposition is only an intermediate step in SVD decomposition. In addition, the proposed method does not have the false-positive detection problem like that based on SVD. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme has better performance in terms of invisibility, robustness, capacity and real-time feature.

Keywords: digital watermarking; colour image; unitary matrix; invisibility; robustness; capacity; real-time feature; Schur decomposition; colour image watermarking; blind extraction.

DOI: 10.1504/IJES.2020.105277

International Journal of Embedded Systems, 2020 Vol.12 No.1, pp.31 - 38

Received: 28 Aug 2017
Accepted: 24 Jan 2018
Published online: 24 Feb 2020 *

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