Copyright Ownership Authentication by Embedding a Biometric Watermark with Discrete Cosine Transform

In respect to the issues on protecting intellectual property, particular for artistic works in electronic form, some sorts of techniques could be put on a copyright material image to ensure its ownership authentication. In this research, signatories’ biometric fingerprint watermark message in digital format will be embedded into a copyright material image by Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) – one of the methods in Transform Domain. During the embedding process, copyright material image and the fingerprint watermark message will be adaptively partitioned and then DCT method will be applied to each partition for embedding and extracting the watermark message. Experimental results from our prototype system show that the proposed method is successfully tested for message embedding and extraction. In case that the watermarked image has been attacked, the embedded digital fingerprint watermark message, can still be extracted with a certain degree of tolerance. Key-Words: intellectual property, ownership authentication, discrete cosine transform, digital fingerprint