A color image watermarking scheme based on color quantization

Digital watermarking has been widely applied to solve copyright protection problems of digital media relating to illegal use or distribution. In the past few years, several gray-level image watermarking schemes have been proposed, but their application to color image watermarking schemes is scarce and usually works on the luminance or individual color channel. In this paper, a new color image watermarking scheme based on the color quantization technique is proposed. Experimental results are shown to demonstrate the validity of the proposed scheme. Furthermore, the proposed scheme can be applied to other multimedia applications that are based on the color quantization technique. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.