Novel copyright protection scheme for digital content

A novel copyright protection scheme for digita l content is presented, which is a private watermarking scheme based on the waterm ark embedding in the DCT domain and watermark extraction using independent compo nent analysis (ICA). The system includes the key for watermark extraction and th e host image. The algorithm splits the original image into blocks and classifies these blocks based on visual masking, that is, noise visibility function (NVF). Watermark components with different strength are inserted into chosen direct cu rrent components of DCT coefficients according to the classifier. The watermark extraction is based on the characteristic of the statistic independence of the h ost image, watermark and key. Principle component analysis (PCA) whitening proce ss and FastICA techniques are introduced to ensure a blind watermark extraction without requiring the original image. Experimental results show the proposed tec hnique is robust under attacks such as image filtering and adding noise, croppin g and resizing. In addition, the proposed private watermarking system can be imp roved to the application of the DTV content protection system.