An efficient copyright protection scheme for digital images using biometrics and watermarking

The drastic advancement of digital technologies has demanded the owners to pay immense attention in securing their digital contents. Of late, watermarking has been utilized by researchers for the security of digital documents. However the embedded watermark data can be easily hacked by the hackers and thus result as a threat to protection of digital content. The proposed method is an efficient scheme for protecting the copyrights of digital images with the aid of both biometrics and digital watermarking. Our scheme utilizes the fingerprint biometric feature of the proprietor to produce the watermark. The minutiae points are obtained from the fingerprint and the co-ordinates of the minutiae points are shuffled. Later, a vector is formed from the shuffled coordinates of minutiae points and is eventually utilized as watermark. The embedding and extraction of watermark is carried out in the DCT-SVD domain. If any ownership disputes arise on the image, the watermark is extracted from the watermarked image and evaluated against the vector constructed from the shuffled co-ordinates of minutiae points which are obtained from the fingerprint of the person asserting ownership. If they go with each other, the claiming person is considered to be the rightful owner of the image. Therefore the biometric feature employed in our scheme establishes that the information is extremely safe. In addition it is not essential to carry the information; it is not possible for the hackers to hack it as well.