A Visual Cryptography Based Digital Image Copyright Protection

Abstract

A method for creating digital image copyright protection is proposed in this paper. The proposed method in this paper is based on visual cryptography defined by Noor and Shamir. The proposed method is working on selection of random pixels from the original digital image instead of specific selection of pixels. The new method proposed does not require that the watermark pattern to be embedded in to the original digital image. Instead of that, verification information is generated which will be used to verify the ownership of the image. This leaves the marked image equal to the original image. The method is based on the relationship between randomly selected pixels and their 8-neighbors' pixels. This relationship keeps the marked image coherent against diverse attacks even if the most significant bits of randomly se-lected pixels have been changed by attacker as we will see later in this paper. Experimental results show the proposed method can recover the watermark pattern from the marked image even if major changes are made to the original digital image.