Watermarking information layers in multispectral images of cultural heritage objects

We present a strategy for transparent, robust watermarking to protect intellectual property rights on cultural heritage images. This can be applied on any kind of vector image, from color to hyperspectral, and has a particular value when each individual channel has its own significance and can be used independently of the others, as often happens with quantitative diagnostic images. For color images, we can reduce the correlation between channels by relying on alternative color spaces. Dealing with images with any number of channels, we rather propose to work in the principal component space, whatever the watermarking algorithm chosen. We motivate why this is advantageous and show an example experiment using an embedding procedure proposed in the literature.