Abstract

When host images are watermarked with CRT (Chinese Remainder Theorem), the watermark images are still robust in spite of the damage of the host images by maintaining the remainders in an unchanged state within some range of the changes that are incurred by the attacks. This advantage can also be attained by "zero-watermarking," which does not change the host images in any way. This paper proposes an improved zero-watermarking scheme for color images on the DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) domain that is based on the CRT. In the scheme, RGB images are converted into YCbCr images, and one channel is used for the DCT transformation. A key is then computed from the DC and three low-frequency AC values of each DCT block using the CRT. The key finally becomes the watermark key after it is combined four times with a scrambled watermark image. When watermark images are extracted, each bit is determined by majority voting. This scheme shows that watermark images are robust against a number of common attacks such as sharpening, blurring, JPEG lossy compression, and cropping.