Developing an efficient digital image watermarking for smartphones

In recent years, Smartphone usage has been increasing rapidly to the point where it surpassed all other electronic devices. Multimedia sharing and Image/Video capturing are amongst the most utilized functionalities of smartphones. Smartphones and Internet availability made the capture, transmission and storage of digital data very easy and convenient. The simplicity, connectivity, and strong capabilities of such devices make it very hard to protect the privacy and Intellectual Property (IP) of digital multimedia. While all types of digital multimedia are at risk, digital images are severely affected. Editing and converting digital images can be done quite easily, and hence protecting them becomes even harder. Digital image watermarking is a technique used to authenticate and protect the IP of digital images. In this paper we propose an efficient and flexible digital watermarking system that runs on Android devices. The system uses RAW images (a feature of the most recent Android software, called Lollipop) to embed a watermark at an early stage before any modification and conversion of the image. The system incorporates public-key cryptography for increased protection. A simple and robust watermarking technique is utilized for efficiency. Other watermarking techniques are offered for flexibility. Finally, the system uses the inherent features of the Android operating system to run in parallel and be available to other applications.