A blind watermarking scheme for TMQIR images

With the advancement of quantum image research, the security of quantum images has also become the focus. The mutimode quantum image representation based on three dimensional coordinates (TMQIR) is efficient and general. Based on the least significant bit (LSB), a blind watermarking scheme for TMQIR images is proposed in this paper. For color images, a RGB carrier TMQIR image is transformed to grayscale based on any two of three color weights. And any two weights can be used as the key to the conversion between color image and grayscale image. Then the grayscale image with watermark is converted into color image according to the selected color weights. In the LSB of the grayscale TMQIR image used as carrier image and watermarked image, the binary watermark image can be embedded and extracted respectively. In the extracting process, a series of operations are performed in the reverse order of the watermarking process. In addition, the quantum circuits in the watermarking and extracting process of the proposed blind watermarking scheme are simulated on IBM Quantum Lab platform. The simulation results show that the scheme is correct and effective, and the scheme is better than the previous schemes in complexity and key space.