A Watermarking Technique based on Visual Cryptography

Abstract

With the explosive growth of internet technology robust methods are being developed to protect the proprietary rights of the multimedia. This paper considers the problem of embedding a binary watermark in a gray-level image using the concept of Visual Cryptography (VC). This paper proposes a watermarking scheme which offers better security than Hwang's method, so that, attackers will not be able to detect ownership information. The proposed scheme embeds the secret image without modifying the host image. In addition, the hidden secret image can be extracted without using the original host image and allows multiple watermarks to be embedded in the same image. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme is robust to withstand several image processing attacks such as JPEG compression, noise adding, sharpening and blurring.