Digital Watermarking System for Copyright Protection and Authentication of Images Using Cryptographic Techniques

Abstract

Digital images are transferred with ease through the network. Many users are using the images without the knowledge of the owners. Therefore, a novel watermarking scheme is proposed to ensure copyright protection and authentication of images using cryptography techniques. Here, a quick response (QR) image is generated for a watermark image that contains public and private keys prepared using a cryptosystem. Later, this QR image is scrambled using a chaotic logistic map. The public and private keys are used to cipher and decipher the data. Next, the scrambled QR watermark is embedded into a color image using a single-level discrete wavelet transform followed by singular value decomposition using the key value. Finally, the inverse process is applied to extract the watermark. The proposed method is validated using various image processing attacks. The results are then compared with state-of-the-art watermarking schemes. The experimental results show that the scheme provides good results in terms of robustness and imperceptibility.