A copyright protection scheme of images based on visual cryptography

This paper proposes a new scheme for effective protection of the intellectu al property rights of digital images. Advantage is taken of visual cryptogr aphy to construct a master share from a digital image, and there is an owne rship share for each copyright. After stacking of these two shares, the own ership information can be recovered directly by the naked eye without any c omputation. The method proposed will not change The host image and can be i nvisible, and moreover it can cast multiple ownerships into an image indepe ndently. Moreover, the method has high security, so that pirates and attack ers will be unable to detect ownership information and fake the ownership o f an image. Experimental results show that, after JPEG lossy compression, b lurring, noise adding and cropping attacks. the ownership can still be robu stly detected from the host image by the new method.