Multimedia data for both personal and commercial purposes is now accessible to everyone due to the rapid development of the Internet. Consequently, the issue of copyright protection has surfaced and has triggered the development of several techniques for multimedia copyright protection. Such techniques include digital watermarking in which the important information contained in the host media is concealed by embedment in carriers such as images, videos, or audios. In this paper, the adaptive color image watermarking technique is proposed for the satisfaction of both imperceptibility and robustness demands. There are two main stages involved in this technique - coding/embedding and decoding/extraction. Prior to the coding stage, imperceptibility and robustness are preserved by first converting the host image from RGB to YCbCr color space before selecting the Cb component to apply the DWT embedding technique. Once more, the selected quadrant of the hosted image is decomposed using DWT before extracting the watermarked image. The robustness and efficiency of this technique were proved by exposing the watermarked image to six types of attacks, namely Median filter, Gaussian noise, Sharpening filter, Salt & Pepper Noise, JPEG Compression, and Rotation. The results of the study were benchmarked against other methods that deploy DST on the same images. From the benchmarking process, the proposed algorithm was found to withstand the six types of attacks earlier mentioned and achieved a better performance compared to the DST approach. The quality of the watermarked image was also preserved in the proposed method.
