A geometric correction based robust color image watermarking scheme using quaternion Exponent moments

Most of the existing color image watermarking schemes was designed to mark grayscale images or use the color components, which ignore the significant correlation between different color channels. Recently, several approaches were developed to process the color channels intrinsically, but they always cannot counterattack geometric distortions. It is a challenging work to design a robust color image watermarking scheme against geometrical distortions. In this paper, we propose a geometric correction based robust color image watermarking approach using quaternion Exponent moments (QEMs). The novelty of our approach is that (1) the QEMs are derived to deal with the color images in a holistic manner, and (2) the QEMs are exploited for estimating the geometric distortions parameters in order to permit watermark extraction. Experimental results confirm the validity of our approach and its higher robustness against geometrical distortions compared to alternative watermarking methods in the literature. (C) 2014 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.