Digital watermarking based on fractal image coding

With advances in computer network and multimedia technology, digital media are rapidly proliferating, and thus the issue of copyright protection for electronic publishing is receiving great attention. To achieve the goal of copyright protection, the digital watermarks are used to identify the owner of a certain image, so as to prevent illegal copying. Digital watermarking is the technique that embeds an invisible signal including owner identification and copy control information into multimedia data such as audio, video, and images. A new digital watermark approach based on fractal image coding is proposed in this paper. We present a way to use the fractal code as a means of embedding a watermark into image. The proposed approach has been shown to be resistant to general attacks, like StirMark. Moreover, someone who owns the decryption key can simply extract the digital watermark from the watermarked image without resorting to the original image.