Embedding color watermarks in color images based on Schur decomposition

In this paper, a blind dual color image watermarking scheme based on Schur decomposition is introduced. This is the first time to use Schur decomposition to embed color image watermark in color host image, which is different from using the binary image as watermark. By analyzing the 4×4 unitary matrix U via Schur decomposition, we can find that there is a strong correlation between the second row first column element and the third row first column element. This property can be explored for embedding watermark and extracting watermark in the blind manner. Since Schur decomposition is an intermediate step in SVD decomposition, the proposed method requires less number of computations. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme is robust against most common attacks including JPEG lossy compression, JPEG 2000 compression, low-pass filtering, cropping, noise addition, blurring, rotation, scaling and sharpening et al. Moreover, the proposed algorithm outperforms the closely related SVD-based algorithm and the spatial-domain algorithm.