Copyright labeling of digitized image data

This article addresses the problem of embedding a robust copyright label into image data for identifying the ownership and distribution of the digitized image. The article first defines a reasonable set of functional requirements and design criteria for an image copyright labeling system, and then describes a labeling method using a JPEG model-based, frequency-hopped, randomly sequenced pulse position modulated code (RSPPMC). Our experiments demonstrated that the proposed method meets the requirements for copyright protection, including the robustness of an embedded label against several damaging possibilities such as lossy data compression, low-pass filtering, and color space conversion, as well as printing/scanning, scaling, and cropping.