A new approach to feature-based copyright protection of images

Watermarking scheme is a well-known method for copyright protection of images. However, it encounters two serious problems. First, some successful attacks can be easily developed to destroy watermark once the embedding algorithm of watermarking is made public. Secondly, we can not identify who the real owner is if multiple watermarks are embedded in an image. In this paper, a robust copyright protection scheme for digital images that combines image feature extraction and time stamp technique is proposed. Our scheme can resist both geometric distortion and signal processing attacks, and can distinguish who the real owner is when multiple watermarks are embedded in the image. Some simulation results are conducted to show that our scheme can work well and efficiently.