Reversible Watermarking For Copy-Right Protection Applications

ABSTRACT
Visible Digital watermarking is a technique that embeds copyright information
perceptibly within the image to prevent illicit use of multimedia content. There are numerous
applications that require user authentication to make the original image content available.
However, the reversible visible watermarking schemes found in literature today are susceptible
to quantization errors induced by lossy images and are therefore not applicable for high quality
multimedia communications applications. This paper presents a novel reversible watermarking
scheme suitable for lossy compressed images. The proposed mechanism reversibly embeds the
residual information packet, required to restore the watermarked region, in the quantized
transform coefficients. Furthermore, the residual information packet is calculated based on the
compressed image in order to suppress quantization errors. Experimental results further
demonstrate that the proposed method managed to recover and authenticate all images
considered.