Visual Cryptographic Permuted Sampling based Binary Image Watermarking

Abstract

This paper proposes a visual cryptography per-muted scrambling (VCPS) based watermarking method for binary images. Binary image (BI), which has only black and white pixels, has a nature of compact storage. Due to the rapid growth of digital technology, a lot of personal information such as health records, hand-written signatures and certificates; book collections and design drawings; cartoon art sketches are stored as digital documents as BIs (white and black pixels) by scanning them. These BIs are communicated through the Internet either for the personal or professional case. Here lies a threat of unauthorized usage of these documents and it is essential to protect them by embedding the watermark (owner information of the binary image). The particularity of the BI makes it more challenging for data hiding because the hiding process is different and only few works are available in this domain. In this paper, the data hiding process is carried out using the coding tables and the encrypted binary watermark shares which is flipped and shuffled using visual cryptography. The proposed technique achieves higher visual quality and less computational cost than the state of the art related techniques.