An adaptive digital image watermarking technique for copyright protection

Digital watermarking technique is proposed for copyright protection or ownership identification of digital media, such as audio, image, video, or text. A digital signature or digital watermark is embedded in the host media. The digital watermark is hidden such that it is perceptually and statistically undetectable. This watermark can then be extracted from the host media and used to identify the owner of the media. In the application of copyright enforcement, the hidden watermark must still be recovered if the host media is compressed, processed, edited, or converted from digital to analog format and back. A digital image watermarking technique will be proposed in this paper. The proposed method uses the sensitivity of human eyes to adaptively embed a watermark in an image without affecting the perceptual quality of the underlying host image. In addition, the watermark will survive if some lossy image processing operations such as low-pass filtering and JPEG image compression are applied to the host image. Finally, we will combine the concept of cryptography and digital watermarking technique to implement a more secure digital watermarking system.