Copyright protection based on visual cryptography

Digital watermark is a technique used to protect one's intellectual property. In this paper, we utilize the characteristics of the visual cryptography, which can't be forged and needn't complex computation to embed our watermark. We treat the most significant bit plane of the original image as the share1. Using the watermark and sharel, we can generate the sharel In this way, we can embed the watermark information into the original image abstractly without modifying the original image. When verifying whether an image belongs to someone's intellectual property, we only need to superimpose the most significant bit plane extracted from the image over the share2 owned by the authors to retrieve the watermark. Because the most significant bit plane can obtain the most robustness after some image processing, the watermark can be extracted without the assistance of the original image. We believe our study can provide an easy and reliable way for the protection of the digital image information.