A robust zero-watermarking scheme using Canny edge detector

Abstract

By expansion of digital multimedia and networking technology, the problem of ownership protection has become increasingly important. Digital watermarking is an efficient way for copyright protection of digital images. Traditional watermarking techniques degrade the quality of host image by embedding a watermark logo. Facing this problem, a new watermarking approach called zero-watermarking has been proposed. In zero-watermarking methods, the watermark does not require to be embedded into the protected image but it uses both the watermark and the protected image to generate a verification map which is registered to a trusted authority for further protection. In this paper we propose a robust zero-watermarking method which uses Canny edge detection and morphological dilation. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed scheme is robust against common geometric and non-geometric attacks including blurring, JPEG compression, noise addition, sharpening, scaling, rotation, and cropping. In addition, our experimental results show that our method could outperform the most recent related methods in most cases.