A novel geometrically invariant quantum watermarking scheme utilizing Quantum Error Correction

This paper proposes a novel geometrically invariant quantum watermarking scheme using Quantum Error Correction (QEC) and Novel Enhanced Quantum Image Representation (NEQR). The Geometric Transformation-based Image Assembling (GTA) mechanism is proposed to reconstruct the quantum watermark image utilizing QEC principle. The proposed GTA mechanism involves Quantum Image Rotation (QIR) and Quantum Block Rotation (QBR), thus two corresponding quantum watermarking methods, GTA_QIR and GTA_QBR, are proposed and detailed quantum circuits with complexity O(n) are designed. Then the Quantum Majority Finder (QMF) is proposed for embedding the watermark uniformly. In the experiments, we employ dataset USC-SIPI to evaluate the visual quality and robustness of the proposed scheme. Comparisons with the recent quantum watermarking methods is conducted and the results show that our methods have a superior performance. When under attack of 'Salt and Pepper' noise addition, the proposed GTA_QIR and GTA_QBR improve the average Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) by 22.57% and 23.49% at a density of 0.05, while at a density of 0.1, the average improvement is 11.13% and 12.05% respectively. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first quantum watermarking scheme which demonstrates resistance to geometric attacks.