Copyright protection scheme for digital images using visual cryptography and sampling methods

A novel copyright protection scheme for digital images based on visual cryptography and statistics is proposed. The proposed method employs sampling distribution of means and visual cryptography to achieve the requirements of robustness and security. Our method can register multiple secret images without altering the host image and can identify the rightful ownership without resorting to the original image. Moreover, the proposed method enables the secret images to be of any size regardless of the size of the host image. Finally, experimental results show that the proposed scheme can resist several common attacks. (c) 2005 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers.