Novel Watermarking Scheme Using Boundary Pixels Least Significant Qubit Steganography

Image watermarking has become a popular area of study in quantum information processing. In this paper, we propose a new watermarking method using boundary pixels of a quantum image. The quantum image is firstly scrambled into a meaningless image and expanded to an appropriate size. Then the expanded and scrambled watermark is embedded into the horizontal direction of boundary pixels of the quantum cover images. The watermark can be extracted using some inverse quantum operations. Supported by the simulation and analysis, the proposal has outperformed some similar quantum schemes in terms of the robustness and PSNR value.