A Visual Cryptography and Statistics Based Method for Ownership Identification of Digital Images

In this paper, a novel copyright protection scheme for digital images based on Visual Cryptography and Statistics is proposed. In our scheme, the theories and properties of sampling distribution of means and visual cryptography are employed to achieve the requirements of robustness and security. Our method does not need to alter the original image and can identify the ownership without resorting to the original image. Besides, our method allows multiple watermarks to be registered for a single host image without causing any damage to other hidden watermarks. Moreover, it is also possible for our scheme to cast a larger watermark into a smaller host image. Finally, experimental results will show the robustness of our scheme against several common attacks.





References:
<p>[1] I. J. Cox, J. Kilian, T. Leighton, and T. Shamoon, &ldquo;Secure spread spectrum watermarking for multimedia,&quot; IEEE Trans. Image Processing. vol. 6, no. 12, pp. 1673-1687, 1997.
[2] S. Katzenbeisser and F. A. P. Petitcolas, Information Hiding Techniques for Steganography and Digital Watermarking, Artech house, Norwood, MA, 2000, pp. 101-109.
[3] E. Koch, J. Rindfrey, and J. Zhao, &ldquo;Copyright protection for multimedia data,&quot; Proc. Int. Conf. on Digital Media and Electronic Publishing, Leeds, UK, pp. 6-8, December 1994.
[4] N. Nikolaidis and I. Pitas, &ldquo;Copyright protection of images using robust digital signatures,&quot; Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. On Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, vol. 4, pp. 2168-2171, May 1996.
[5] Y. C. Hou and P. M. Chen, &ldquo;An asymmetric watermarking scheme based on visual cryptography,&quot; Proc. Fifth Signal Process. Conf., vol. 2, pp. 992-995, 2000.
[6] S. Low and N. Maxemchuk, &ldquo;Performance comparison of two text marking methods,&quot; IEEE J. Selected Areas in Communications, vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 561-572, 1998.
[7] R. Ohbuchi, H. Masuda, and M. Aono, &ldquo;Watermarking three-dimensional polygonal models through geometric and topological modifications,&quot; IEEE J. Selected Areas in Communications, vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 551-560, 1998.
[8] C. C. Chang, J. Y. Hsiao, and J. C. Yeh, &ldquo;A colour image copyright protection scheme based on visual cryptography and discrete cosine transform,&quot; The Imaging Science J., vol. 50, no. 133-140, 2002.
[9] C. T. Hsu and J. L. Wu, &ldquo;Hidden digital watermarks in image,&quot; IEEE Trans. Image Processing, vol. 8, no. 58-68, 1999.
[10] W. S. Kim, O. H. Hyung, and R. H. Park, &ldquo;Wavelet based watermarking method for digital images using the human visual system,&quot; Electron. Lett., vol. 35, pp. 466-468, 1999.
[11] M. Naor and S A. Shamir, &ldquo;Visual cryptography,&quot; Advances in Cryptology-EUROCRYPT -94, LNCS 950, Springer-Verlag, pp. 1-12, 1995.
[12] M. L. Berenson and D. M. Levine, Basic Business Statistics: Concepts and Applications. Prentice-Hall, New Jersey, 1999, pp. 337- 353.</p>