Image copyright protection schemes Using biometric watermarking

Abstract

Copyright protection of images is a serious concern faced by various classes of photographers. It occurs when someone, either accidentally or deliberately, uses a photograph without getting the permission of the owner of the photo. One of the solutions to prevent online image theft is to use biometric watermarking on the photo to be protected. newlineThe existing system has multiple issues and challenges such as the use of a logo or password that occasionally fails to prove the identity, issues concerning watermark imperceptibility and issues related to robustness against attacks. The proposed system focusses on three approaches that utilizes biometric information to claim ownership in the event of a dispute over image ownership. These three approaches are implemented in three different domains such as spatial domain, transform domain and wavelet domain, each of which is designed to improve the robustness against attacks and to reduce elapsed time. The first one employs a unimodal spatial domain approach with fingerprint as the watermark. The second one employs a transformation- based approach that uses iris of the owner as the watermark. The third one employs a lifting wavelet transform based approach with multimodal biometrics as the watermark. The strength of robustness gets improved and elapsed time gets decreased with successive approaches. The proposed system makes use of a standard data set, fingerprint, iris images and analyses watermark imperceptibility using Mean Square Error, Peak Signal to Noise Ratio, and Structural Similarity Index. It also analysed robustness against attacks using Normalized Cross Correlation and Bit Error Rate. newline newline