Efficient Robust Watermarking Based on Structure-Preserving Quaternion Singular Value Decomposition

Quaternion singular value decomposition (QSVD) is a robust technique of digital watermarking that extracts high quality watermarks from watermarked images with low distortion. However, the existing QSVD-based watermarking schemes face the obstacle of “explosion of complexity” and have much room for improvement in terms of real-time, invisibility, and robustness. In this paper, we overcome such obstacle by introducing a new real structure-preserving QSVD algorithm and propose a novel QSVD-based watermarking scheme with high efficiency. Secret information is transmitted blindly by incorporating two new strategies: coefficient pair selection and adaptive embedding. The highly correlated coefficient pairs determined by the normalized cross-correlation method reduce the impact of embedding by reducing the maximum modification of the coefficient values, resulting in high fidelity of the watermarked image. Large-size 8-color binary watermark and QR code effectively verify that the proposed watermarking scheme can resist various image attacks in numerical experiments. Two keys designed by Logistic chaotic map ensure the security of the watermarking system. Under the premise of considering the correlation of color channels, the proposed watermarking scheme not only performs well in real-time and invisibility, but also has satisfactory advantages in robustness compared with the state-of-the-art methods.