A Novel Image Degradation Scheme Based On Reversible Watermarking

In some business applications, the rough content of a digital image can be accessed through public channel, but the detailed image can only be achieved by some interested buyers who pay for the key. Reversible visible watermarking provides a kind of protection, but covers parts of image. In this paper, we utilize the relationship between embedding capacity and visual distortion, and proposed a novel image degradation scheme for copyright protection based on reversible difference expansion watermarking. Experiment results show that our scheme degrades the images uniformly, and the general content is still available. And the legal users with key can restore the original image with full details and extract the copyright proof.