An Efficient Copyright Protection Technique for Digital Images Based on Finite Groups

It is well known that a digital signature scheme and digital timestamp are two well-defined security methods for copyright protection. However, these techniques are not suitable for dealing with digital images directly because of some intrinsic features of digital images such as large amount of data, highly redundancy, and strong correlation among pixels. For this reason, digital watermarking has received considerable attention for copyright protection. In this paper, a robust copyright protection scheme for digital image is proposed. In the new scheme, color images can be used as the watermark is an important characteristic and the watermark does not require to be embedded into the protected image but is used to generate a secret image by addition operations over finite groups, then the secret image is registered to certified authority (CA) for further protection. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme not only can clearly verify the copyright of the digital image, but also is robust to withstand many image processing attacks.