Using Space-Time Coding for Watermarking Color Images

In this paper, we propose a new scheme for watermarking color images. We use space-time coding for watermark data before embedding in the image. The information of the two generated bitstream of space-time coder are embedded in red and blue component of the image. At the receiver, the space-time decoder combines the information of each bitstream to reconstruct the watermark data. Furthermore, this scheme requires no knowledge of the original image for the recovery of the watermark data. We experiment the proposed scheme for embedding 128 bits in the spatial domain of a color host image of 512×512 pixels. Simulation results show that watermarking scheme based on space-time coding has low visible distortions in the host image and robustness to various signal processing and geometrical attacks, such as addition of noise, compression, cropping and down-sampling.

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