A Novel Invisible and Blind Watermarking Scheme For Copyright Protection of Digital Images

Nowadays, the issue of protecting copyrights of digital contents has become very much critical owing to the swift growth of the Internet. Protecting the high-value digital assets and controlling the distribution and usage of those digital assets are the tasks of the Digital Rights Management (DRM) system. Watermarking technologies are being looked upon as promising means to safe guard the copyrights of digital images. Digital watermarking conceals the secret or personal information in digital images in order to guard their copyrights. In this paper, we present a novel invisible and blind watermarking scheme for copyright protection against piracy of digital images. The proposed watermarking scheme embeds a binary watermark image invisibly into a host image for protecting its copyrights. For every 2x2 block of the host image, a watermark pixel is embedded using the proposed approach. As the proposed watermarking scheme is blind, the extraction of watermark requires only the watermarked image and it doesn't demand the original image or any of its characteristics. The experimental results have demonstrated the efficacy of the proposed watermarking scheme.