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New watermarking algorithm utilizing quaternion Fourier transform with advanced scrambling and secure encryption

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Abstract

Digital watermarking technology, as a powerful tool for copyright protection and content authentication of multimedia works, has received increasing attention, and the current image watermarking technology has developed significantly. Generally, embedding a watermark is done in grayscale images, mainly due to the fact that grayscale images are easier to process than color images, and grayscale images only contain brightness information and color-free information, in which an embedded watermark will not produce new color components. In real life, however, color images are more common than grayscale image information. To improve the security of the watermark information and the ability to embed the location and improve the security of the algorithm against a variety of attacks, this paper proposes an algorithm based on quaternion Fourier transform (QFT) with chaotic encryption and Arnold scrambling. Geometric Algebra (GA) can process color images in the form of vectors, and each component of Red,Green and Blue (RGB) should be processed separately. We utilized quaternion (which is a subalgebra of GA) and effectively completed color image processing by utilizing Fourier transform. After utilizing QFT, each component was made more secure by scrambling the pixels of the watermark and performing encryption utilizing chaotic sequencing. Different types of results utilizing Mean Square Error (MSE),Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR),Structure Similiarity Index Metric (SSIM), etc. were computed to verify the performance of our proposed algorithm and show that the robustness and security are high by utilizing our method.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 41625004, 41976186, and Six talent peaks project in Jiangsu Province under Grant RJFW-019.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Geography (Remote sensing & GIS), Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China

    Uzair Aslam Bhatti, Linwang Yuan & Zhaoyuan Yu

  2. Key Laboratory of Virtual Geographic Environment, Ministry of Education and Jiangsu Provincial Key Laboratory of NSLSCS, Nanjing Normal University, No. 1 Wenyuan Road, Nanjing, China

    Linwang Yuan

  3. Key Laboratory of Virtual Geographic Environment, Ministry of Education, Nanjing Normal University, No. 1 Wenyuan Road, Nanjing, China

    Linwang Yuan

  4. College of Information and Communication Engineering, Hainan University, Haikou, 570228, China

    JingBing Li, Saqib Ali Nawaz & Kun Zhang

  5. School of Medicine, Southeast University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China

    Anum Mehmood

Authors
  1. Uzair Aslam Bhatti
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  2. Linwang Yuan
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  3. Zhaoyuan Yu
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  4. JingBing Li
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  5. Saqib Ali Nawaz
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  6. Anum Mehmood
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  7. Kun Zhang
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Correspondence to Linwang Yuan.

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Bhatti, U.A., Yuan, L., Yu, Z. et al. New watermarking algorithm utilizing quaternion Fourier transform with advanced scrambling and secure encryption. Multimed Tools Appl 80, 13367–13387 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-020-10257-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-020-10257-1

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