A Copyright Protection Scheme for Gray-Level Images Based on Image Secret Sharing and Wavelet Transformation

Abstract

A copyright protection scheme for graylevel images based on image secret sharing and wavelet transformation is proposed in this paper. The scheme contains a secret image generation phase and a watermark retrieval phase. In the generation phase, the proposed scheme extracts the features from a host image using the discrete wavelet transformation (DWT), and then employs the features and the watermark, a visually recognizable pattern, to generate the secret image using the image secret sharing (ISS). In the retrieval phase, the watermark is retrieved by combining the secret image and the features obtained from the suspect image. The retrieved watermark is then compared with the original watermark for copyright verification. The experiment shows that the proposed scheme can withstand 5 kinds of common image processing operations, including JPEG compression, blurring, sharpening, scaling, and cropping.