An image protection scheme using the wavelet coefficients based on fingerprinting technique

Abstract

Various technologies have been used to protect the copyrights of digital contents from illegal or unintentional attacks. Watermarking methods protect digital contents by embedding a watermark message into them. However, since conventional watermarking algorithms change original digital contents to embed digital watermarks using various embedding methods, they result in the degradation of digital contents and decrease the fidelity of digital contents. A fingerprinting technique can be also used for protecting digital contents. However this method may have high computational complexity to generate unique features for digital contents. In order to provide the excellent fidelity, the proposed technique distributes original digital contents without any change like fingerprinting technique and just generates the content-associated information, which is combined wavelet coefficients with copyright message and used to extract copyright message afterward. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms an existing method for various signal processing attacks. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.