A Comparison between Digital Image Watermarking in Tow Different Color Spaces Using DWT2

TL;DR

This paper introduces a digital watermarking method using DWT in YCbCr color space, embedding binary images into the Y channel, which improves imperceptibility and robustness without needing the original image.

Contribution

It proposes a novel watermarking technique in YCbCr space using DWT and LSB insertion, enhancing robustness and imperceptibility over traditional RGB methods.

Findings

Better imperceptibility compared to RGB-based methods

Increased robustness against wavelet compression

No need for original image during extraction

Abstract

A novel digital watermarking for ownership verification and image authentication applications using discrete wavelet transform (DWT) is proposed in this paper. Most previous proposed watermarking algorithms embed sequences of random numbers as watermarks. Here binary images are taken as watermark for embedding. In the proposed approach, the host image is converted into the YCbCr color space and then its Y channel decomposed into wavelet coefficients. The selected approximation coefficients are quantized and then their four least significant bits of the quantized coefficients are replaced by the watermark using LSB insertion technique. At last, the watermarked image is synthesized from the changed and unchanged DWT coefficients. The experiments show that the proposed approach provides extra imperceptibility and robustness against wavelet compression compared to the traditional embedding methods in RGB color space. Moreover, the proposed approach has no need of the original image to extract watermarks.