High Payload Watermarking using Residue Number System

Information hiding or data hiding, also known as watermarking, has become a part and parcel of covert communication and copyright protection. Maximizing watermark payload is a major challenge for watermark researchers. To overcome this issue, we have proposed a new color image watermarking technique, using residue number system (RNS). RNS refers to a large integer using a set of smaller integers which relies on the Chinese remainder theorem of modular arithmetic for its operation. The proposed method takes pixel values from three watermark images and embeds them into the main cover image. Experimental results presented in this paper shows that the watermark can be successfully embedded and extracted from an image, without distorting the original image using the proposed technique. The high peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and payload values claims the robustness of the proposed method.