Color Image Robust Zero-Hiding Based on Quaternion Improved Radial Harmonic Fourier Moments

The proliferation of multimedia technology has heightened concerns over copyright protection and information security. Traditional embedding-based information-hiding techniques often degrade the original data, making them unsuitable for applications requiring high data integrity, such as medical and military fields. Zero-hiding techniques offer a solution by encrypting watermarks using feature information from the carrier data, preserving the visual integrity of the image. This article introduces improved radial harmonic Fourier moments (ImRHFMs) to address numerical instability issues in existing methods. By extending ImRHFMs to quaternion ImRHFMs (QImRHFMs) suitable for color images, the proposed scheme enhances resistance to geometric attacks. The modified Henon map is employed for chaotic encryption, further bolstering the scheme's security. Experimental results validate the scheme's robustness against a wide range of attacks, including JPEG compression, noise, filtering, and geometric distortions. The proposed method outperforms existing zero-hiding schemes, demonstrating its potential for lossless copyright protection in color images. The article also explores the generalization of robustness across different image sizes and domains, confirming the algorithm's versatility and practical applicability.