Abstract: We propose a robust digital watermarking algorithm for copyright protection. A stable feature is obtained by utilizing QR factorization and discrete cosine transform (DCT) techniques, and a meaningful watermark image is embedded into an image by modifying the stable feature with a quantization index modulation (QIM) method. The combination of QR factorization, DCT, and QIM techniques guarantees the robustness of the algorithm. Furthermore, an embedding location selection method is exploited to select blocks with small modifications as the embedding locations. This can minimize the embedding distortion and greatly improve the imperceptibility of our scheme. Several standard images were tested and the experimental results were compared with those of other published schemes. The results demonstrate that our proposed scheme can achieve not only better imperceptibility, but also stronger robustness against common signal processing operations and lossy compressions, such as filtering, noise addition, scaling, sharpening, rotation, cropping, and JPEG/JPEG2000 compression.

Key words: Digital watermarking, QR factorization, Quantization index modulation (QIM), Discrete cosine transform (DCT)

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