A Watermarking Sharing Scheme for Gray-Level Images Using Multiple-Based Number System

A novel watermarking sharing scheme for gray-level images is proposed, which has the ability of sharing secret (the gray-level image) with multi-users. Multiple-based number system is used to split the secret into n meaningless shares, each share is embedded into cover image with controlled distortion and to be assigned to each user afterwards. The main feature of the proposed scheme is sharing a secret of gray-level image among multi-users; another application of such scheme is ownership verification. To reveal the secret, the necessary amount of shares has to be presented. That is, the secret can be recovered even if some shares are lost. Simulation results show that the recovered secret has robustness against a wide range of imaging processing operations.