A digital image copyright protection scheme based on visual cryptography

A simple and efficient watermark method is proposed in this paper. The watermark method is an excellent technique to protect the copyright ownership of a digital image. The proposed watermark method is built up on the concept of visual cryptography. According to the proposed method, the watermark pattern does not have to be embedded into the original image directly, which makes it harder to detect or recover from the marked image in an illegal way. It can be retrieved from the marked image without making comparison with the original image. The notary also can off-line adjudge the ownership of the suspect image by this method. The watermark pattern can be any significant black/white image that can be used to typify the owner. Experimental results show that the watermark pattern in the marked image has good transparency and robustness. By the proposed method, all the pixels of the marked image are equal to the original image.