A Semi-Blind Logo Watermarking Scheme for Color Images by Comparison and Modification of DFT Coefficients

Digital watermarking is considered to be a major technology for the protection of multimedia data. Some of the important applications are broadcast monitoring, copyright protection, and access control. In this paper, we present a semi-blind watermarking scheme for embedding a logo in color images using the DFT domain. After computing the DFT of the luminance layer of the cover image, the magnitudes of DFT coefficients are compared, and modified. A given watermark is embedded in three frequency bands: Low, middle, and high. Our experiments show that the watermarks extracted from the lower frequencies have the best visual quality for low pass filtering, adding Gaussian noise, JPEG compression, resizing, rotation, and scaling, and the watermarks extracted from the higher frequencies have the best visual quality for cropping, intensity adjustment, histogram equalization, and gamma correction. Extractions from the fragmented and translated image are identical to extractions from the unattacked watermarked image. The collusion and rewatermarking attacks do not provide the hacker with useful tools.