Blind Watermarking Scheme for Digital Images

In modern times, the rapid growth of the Internet has made copyright protection of digital contents a critical issue. A Digital Rights Management (DRM) system is aimed at protecting the high-value digital assets and controlling the distribution and utilization of those digital assets. Watermarking technologies are being regarded as a vital mean to proffer copyright protection of digital images. Digital watermarking hides, in digital images, the information necessary for ownership identity to offer copyright protection. This paper proposes an innovative invisible and blind watermarking scheme for copyright protection of digital images with the purpose of defending against digital piracy. In the proposed watermarking scheme, a binary watermark image is invisibly embedded into the host image for achieving copyright protection. In watermark embedding, every pixel of the watermark image is embedded into the individual blocks of the host image sized 2x2. (ii) n-level RIVC scheme, the content of an image S is designated to multiple regions associated with n secret levels, and encoded to n+1 shares with the following features: (a) each share cannot obtain any of the secrets in S, (b) any t(2 ≤t≤n+1)shares can be used to reveal t-1 levels of secrets, (c) the number and locations of not-yetrevealed secrets are unknown to users, (d) all secrets in S can be disclosed when all of the n+1 shares are available, and (e) the secrets are recognized by visually inspecting correctly stacked shares without computation. The efficiency of the proposed watermarking scheme has been demonstrated via the experimental results