On the implementation of a copyright protection scheme using digital image watermarking

Abstract

In this paper, a spatial domain based digital image watermarking scheme has been developed to serve the purpose of copyright protection for digital images. This scheme proposes how to embed copyright information, i.e. the watermark bits by adaptive LSB replacement technique. Here, to improve imperceptibility, imperfect nature of human visual system has been exploited by means of saliency map generation. Robustness and data hiding capacity are also optimized by modifying the higher bit-planes instead of only the LSB. A few signal processing attacks are applied to evaluate the robustness, and several image quality metrics are involved in this purpose. The quality metrics are also used in verifying experimental results in terms of imperceptibility; and finally the system proficiency is compared to some existing frameworks. A proper benchmarking is also employed for a quantitative justification of the visual image degradation, caused by watermark insertion.