Digital image watermarking

Abstract

Watermarking has been invoked as a tool for the protection of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) of multimedia contents. Because of their digital nature, multimedia documents can be duplicated, modified, transformed, and diffused very easily. In this context, it is important to develop a system for copyright protection, protection against duplication, and authentication of contents. For this, a watermark is embedded into the digital data in such a way that it is indissolubly tied to the data itself. Later on, such watermark can be extracted to prove ownership to trace the dissemination of the marked work through the network, or simply to inform users about the identity of the rights-holder or about the allowed use of data. This thesis deals the developing the watermarking schemes for digital images stored in both, spatial and transformed domain. In this thesis we mainly focus on the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) based development. To prove its commercial usability, we take special care so that at least one attack, having huge financial implications, can be sustained due to the in-built capacity of the watermarking scheme.