A Robust Blind Image Watermarking Scheme in Spatial Domain for Copyright Protection

In recent times, the rapid growth of the Internet has led to the critical issue of copyright protection of digital contents. The two significant tasks of the Digital Rights Management (DRM) system are: Protection of the high-value digital assets and Control over the distribution and usage of those digital assets. One of the most promising means to safe guard the copyright of digital images is watermarking. Digital watermarking hides the secret or private information in digital images in order to facilitate copyright protection. Here, we propose a robust and blind watermarking scheme for copyright protection against digital image piracy. The proposed watermarking scheme invisibly embeds a binary watermark image into the host image for protecting its copyrights. In watermark embedding, an individual watermark pixel is embedded into every 2x2 block of the host image. The watermark extraction process necessitates only the watermarked image and not the original image or any of its characteristics, as the proposed watermarking scheme is blind. The experimental results recorded with the aid of attack analysis illustrate the efficiency and robustness of the proposed watermarking scheme.