Cryptanalysis and improvement of the robust and blind watermarking scheme for dual color image (Q1665927)

Summary: With more color images being widely used on the Internet, the research on embedding color watermark image into color host image has been receiving more attention. Recently, \textit{Q. Su} et al. [``A novel blind digital watermarking algorithm for embedding color image into color image'', Optik -- Int. J. Light and Electron Optics 124, No. 18, 3254--3259 (2013; \url{doi:10.1016/j.ijleo.2012.10.005})] have proposed a robust and blind watermarking scheme for dual color image, in which the main innovation is the using of two-level DCT. However, it has been demonstrated in this paper that the original scheme in Su's study is not secure and can be attacked by our proposed method. In addition, some errors in the original scheme have been pointed out. Also, an improvement measure is presented to enhance the security of the original watermarking scheme. The proposed method has been confirmed by both theoretical analysis and experimental results.