Owner-customer right protection mechanism using a watermarking scheme and a watermarking protocol

Over the past few years, there have been more and more robust watermarking schemes proposed for copyright protection of digital documents. The authors combine cryptography with watermarking to simultaneously address the problems of protecting the owner's copyright and the legal customer's ownership. The authors propose a robust watermarking scheme based on visual cryptography and a watermarking protocol based on asymmetric cryptography. It is worthwhile to note that the proposed schemes are resistant to counterfeit, collusion, averaging, and copy attacks, while the large majority of robust watermarking schemes are not. Furthermore, the application of digital signature and timestamp makes public verification possible. (c) 2006 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.