Robust image watermarking based on luminance modification

A robust image watermarking technique based on a modification of the luminance component of the host color image is described. Three methods are proposed in the watermarking scheme in order to improve its performance in terms of accuracy of the extracted watermark and robustness of the embedded watermark. These methods are a new approach to watermark embedding in the luminance component of a host image and a new original image prediction technique in the watermark extraction process. A set of experiments is carried out to verify our proposed methods. The experimental results show significant improvements gained from our proposed watermarking scheme compared to previous existing schemes. The results also show enhanced robustness of the embedded watermark against various types of attacks. Our proposed watermarking scheme can be used for both color and gray scale images. (C) The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI.