A blind color image watermarking based on DC component in the spatial domain

Color image watermarking has become essential and important copyright protection or authentication scheme. It is noted that most of the existing color image watermarking algorithms are performed only in the single domain (spatial domain or frequency domain), and not to integrate these merits of the different domains. By utilizing the generating principle and distribution feature of the direct current (DC) coefficient, a novel blind watermarking algorithm is proposed for color host images in this paper. Firstly, the Y luminance of host image is divided into 8 × 8 sub-blocks and the DC coefficients of each block are directly calculated in the spatial domain without DCT transform. Secondly, according to the watermark information and the quantization step, the DC coefficients are calculated and their increments are further utilized to modify directly the values of all pixels in the spatial domain instead of the DCT domain to embed watermark. When watermark extraction, only the watermarked image and the quantization step are needed in the spatial domain. Experimental results show that the proposed method not only can resist both traditional signal processing attacks and geometric attacks, but also has more efficient in computational complexity. Comparisons also demonstrate the advantages of the method.