Color image watermarking against fog effects

Fog effects in various computer and camera software can partially or fully damage the watermark information within the watermarked image. In this paper, we propose a color image watermarking based on the modification of reflectance component against fog effects. The reflectance component is extracted from the blue color channel in the RGB color space of a host image, and then used to carry a watermark signal. The watermark extraction is blindly achieved by subtracting the estimation of the original reflectance component from the watermarked component. The performance of the proposed watermarking method in terms of wPSNR and NC is evaluated, and then compared with the previous method. The experimental results on robustness against various levels of fog effect, from both computer software and mobile application, demonstrated a higher robustness of our proposed method, compared to the previous one.