Image copyright protection with forward error correction

A copyright protection method for digital image with 1/T rate forward error correction (FEC) is proposed in this paper. In this method, the original image is lossless and the watermark is robust to malicious attacks including geometric attacks such as scaling, rotation, cropping, print–photocopy–scan, and scaling–cropping attacks and nongeometric attacks such as low-pass filtering, sharpening, JPEG compression attacks. The watermark logo is fused with noise bits to improve the security, and later XORed with the feature value of the image by 1/T rate FEC. During extraction, the watermark bits are determined by majority voting, and the extraction procedure needs neither the original image nor the watermark logo. Experimental results show that not only the image is lossless but also the proposed method can effectively resist the common malicious attacks. Since the proposed method is based on spatial domain and there is no need to do frequency transform, the embedding and extraction performances are quite improved.