Method for Construction of Highly Robust Watermarks in the Task of Copyright Protection for Digital Images

In this paper, the method for construction of highly-robust digital watermarks is proposed. The so-called noise-like watermarks are synthesized artificially using a key sequence, serving as verification information during the extraction process. The main goal of the research is to investigate the possibility of the method application for the protection of raster images against illegal distribution. The constructed watermarks are embedded into bitmap images using the least significant bit (LSB) strategy. It is shown that, due to the unique features of the noise-like watermarks, the robustness of LSB schemes can be significantly increased, which allows to provide the possibility of their application in the task of protection against illegal distribution. The results of the conducted experiments demonstrate clear advantages of the proposed watermarking method over existing analogues: the noise-like watermark images possess high robustness against carrier modifications and malicious attacks, while the embedding into the spatial domain does not significantly decrease the carrier quality.