Hybrid Watermarking Algorithm Using Clifford Algebra With Arnold Scrambling and Chaotic Encryption

With the widespread use of color images, the copyright protection of those images using watermarks is one of the latest research topics. The use of color images as watermarks has advantages over binary and irreplaceable grayscale images. Color images are intuitive, rich, and lively; they have large amounts of copyright protection information and more easily recognized by human vision. To improve the security of watermark information and embedding positions and improve the algorithm’s robustness against various attacks, a Quaternion Fourier transform (QFT) based algorithm, based on Arnold transform and chaotic encryption, is proposed in this paper. Geometric algebra (GA) can deal with color images in vector form with each component of RGB handled individually. We used Quaternion, which is a sub-algebra of GA, and effectively handled color image processing by using Fourier transformation. After deriving the calculation process of the QFT with strong security by Arnold scrambling and chaotic encryption, this paper proposes a digital watermarking algorithm that resists geometric attacks by using color images as carriers. The robustness and quality of the proposed watermarking algorithm is tested with different with many statistical measures. Experimental outcomes show that the proposed approach is the best to solve conflict problems between quality and robustness. Also, the proposed approach exhibits worthy robustness against many attacks, such as, conventional attacks, and geometrical attacks.