Image Retrieval and Copyright Notification Based on Multipurpose Watermarking Scheme

Abstract

The rapid development of Internet and multimedia technologies has made image retrieval and copyright problem be the two most important issues in the digital world. To solve these problems simultaneously,this paper presents a multipurpose watermarking scheme: to notify the copyright owner with a visible watermark, and to retrieve the image with an invisible watermark. The proposed scheme consists of two main phases, offline process and online retrieval process. A copyright symbol is used as the visible watermark and the feature vector is extracted from each image as the invisible watermark to be embedded into the image,which is the preprocessing operation called offline process. The online retrieval process consists of three processes, i.e., query feature computation, watermark extraction and feature vector matching. Since the features are embedded in the image data, it is unnecessary to compute the features but only to extract it from the watermarked image. We carry out a series of experiments on a watermarked image database, and simulation results indicate the advantage of the proposed watermarking scheme.