A copyright protection scheme of images based on visual cryptography

Abstract

This paper proposes a new scheme for effective protection of the intellectual property rights of digital images. Advantage is taken of visual cryptography to construct a master share from a digital image, and there is an ownership share for each copyright. After stacking of these two shares, the ownership information can be recovered directly by the naked eye without any computation. The method proposed will not change the host image and can be invisible, and moreover it can cast multiple ownerships into an image independently. Moreover, the method has high security, so that pirates and attackers will be unable to detect ownership information and fake the ownership of an image. Experimental results show that, after JPEG lossy compression, blurring, noise adding and cropping attacks, the ownership can still be robustly detected from the host image by the new method.

Keywords:

• naked eye
• intellectual property rights
• secret sharing scheme
• visual cryptography