Copyright Protection with EXIF Metadata and Error Control Codes

In this paper, we propose a practical scheme for copyright protection of images with the aid of EXIF metadata and error control codes. Application for robust watermarking is one of the major branches in digital rights management (DRM) systems and digital forensics. By use of robust watermarking, it generally alters selected coefficients in the transform domain to accomplish the embedding process. We consider not only the image contents itself, but we also employ the EXIF metadata, which serves as the role of watermark, to be integrated into our scheme. Moreover, for enhancing the copyright protection capability, channel coding is employed. Taking the manufacturer, camera model, date and time stamp, and some other information in the EXIF metadata into account, conventional watermarking techniques can be applied to ordinary pictures taken by ourselves, and watermarked images with good quality can be produced. Even when the marked image has been intentionally modified, the original EXIF with selected information can mostly be recovered from the channel decoding process. Simulation results present the effectiveness of such an implementation.