A Novel Copyright Protection Scheme Using Visual Cryptography

Visual cryptography scheme is a cryptographic technique which allows visual information to be encrypted in such a way that the decryption can be performed by the human visual system, without the aid of computers. In this article, we propose a novel scheme for copyright protection for digital images based on visual cryptography. The proposed method employs encoding of Most Significant bits of host image which is to be copyrighted, to form a master image share. The master share is encoded with a copyright image to form another share called ownership share. The master share is kept with a central authority and ownership share is kept by the copyright owner. In case of any dispute, the master shares and ownership shares can be stacked together to give the copyright image verifying the ownership about the host image. The important feature of our procedure is that we don not disturb the host image either during copyright generation nor during copyright verification. The proposed method is also independent of the size of secret image.