Watermarking mobile phone colour images with Reed Solomon error correction code

This paper proposes a new watermarking scheme for embedding phone numbers into colour images captured by a mobile phone camera. Firstly, the phone number digits are transformed into binary format and the checksum is added as extra bits. Then the generated binary vector is encoded using Reed Solomon error correction code and the generated sequence is transformed into binary matrix. This generated binary matrix, which is the watermark, is inserted in one of the DCT coefficients of the 8×8 block of the cover colour image. The distortion caused by the watermarking is assessed by using the PSNR and SSIM. The robustness of the scheme is assessed by using “Stirmark” software package. The new algorithm offered better performance to the case without using error correction codes and survived JPEG compression and different 3×3 two dimensional filtering.