摘要

In this study, a novel blind image watermarking technique using Hessenberg decomposition is proposed to embed colour watermark image into colour host image. In the process of embedding watermark, the watermark information of colour image is embedded into the second row of the second column element and the third row of the second column element in the orthogonal matrix obtained by Hessenberg decomposition. In the process of extracting watermark, neither the original host image nor the original watermark image is needed and it is impossible to retrieve them without the authorised keys. Experimental results show that the proposed colour image watermarking technique based on Hessenberg decomposition outperforms other watermarking methods and it is robust to resist a wide range of attacks, e.g. image compression, filtering, cropping, rotation, adding noise, blurring, scaling, sharpening and rotation and so on. Especially, the proposed method has lower computational complexity than other methods based on singular value decomposition or QR decomposition.