Color image watermark extraction based on support vector machines

This work proposes a novel watermarking technique called SVM-based Color Image Watermarking (SCIW), based on support vector machines (SVMs) for the authentication of color images. To protect the copyright of a color image, a signature (a watermark), which is represented by a sequence of binary data, is embedded in the color image. The watermark-extraction issue can be treated as a classification problem involving binary classes. The SCIW method constructs a set of training patterns with the use of binary labels by employing three image features, which are the differences between a local image statistic and the luminance value of the center pixel in a sliding window with three distinct shapes. This set of training patterns is gathered from a pair of images, an original image and its corresponding watermarked image in the spatial domain. A quasi-optimal hyperplane (a binary classifier) can be realized by an SVM. The SCIW method utilizes this set of training patterns to train the SVM and then applies the trained SVM to classify a set of testing patterns. Following the results produced by the classifier (the trained SVM), the SCIW method retrieves the hidden signature without the original image during watermark extraction. Experimental results have demonstrated that the SCIW method is sufficiently robust against several color-image manipulations, and that it outperforms other proposed methods considered in this work. (C) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.