Optimal blind watermarking for color images based on the U matrix of quaternion singular value decomposition

In this paper, a new blind watermarking for copyright protection of color images based on the U matrix through Quatemion Singular Value Decomposition (QSVD) is proposed. The proposed method represents the color image with a quaternion matrix, so that it can deal with the multichannel information in a holistic way. Then the array of pure quaternion is divided into non-overlapping blocks and we perform QSVD on each block to get its U matrix. The watermark is inserted into the optimally selected coefficients of the quaternion elements in the first column of the U matrix. Besides, in the procedures of watermark insertion and extraction, ensuring higher fidelity and robustness to several possible image attacks have been considered. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms existing schemes in terms of robustness and invisibility.