Copyright protection for digital image by watermarking technique

Due to the rapid growth and expansion of the Internet, the digital multimedia such as image, audio and video are available for everyone. Anyone can make unauthorized copying for any digital product. Accordingly, the owner of these products cannot protect his ownership. Unfortunately, this situation will restrict any improvement which can be done on the digital media production in the future. Some procedures have been proposed to protect these products such as cryptography and watermarking techniques. Watermarking means embedding a message such as text, the image is called watermark, yet, in a host such as a text, an image, an audio, or a video, it is called a cover. Watermarking can provide and ensure security, data authentication and copyright protection for the digital media. In this paper, a new watermarking method of still image is proposed for the purpose of copyright protection. The procedure of embedding watermark is done in a transform domain. The discrete cosine transform (DCT) is exploited in the proposed method, where the watermark is embedded in the selected coefficients according to several criteria. With this procedure, the deterioration on the image is minimized to achieve high invisibility. Unlike the traditional techniques, in this paper, a new method is suggested for selecting the best blocks of DCT coefficients. After selecting the best DCT coefficients blocks, the best coefficients in the selected blocks are selected as a host in which the watermark bit is embedded. The coefficients selection is done depending on a weighting function method, where this function exploits the values and locations of the selected coefficients for choosing them. The experimental results proved that the proposed method has produced good imperceptibility and robustness for different types of attacks. © 2017 KIPS.