A DCT-Domain System for Digital Watermarking

Digital watermarking has been proposed as a solution to the problem of copyright protection of multimedia data in a networked environment. It makes possible to tightly associated to a digital document a code allowing the identification of the data creator, owner, authorized consumer, and so on. In this paper a new DCT-domain system for digital watermarking algorithm for digital images is presented: the method, which operates in the frequency domain, embeds a pseudo-random sequence of scrambled image in a selected set of DCT coefficients. After embedding, the watermark is adapted to the image by exploiting the masking characteristics of the human visual system, thus ensuring the watermark invisibility. By exploiting the statistical properties of the embedded sequence, the mark can be reliably extracted without resorting to the original uncorrupted image. Experimental results demonstrate that the watermark is robust to several signal processing techniques, including JPEG compression, cut, fuzzy, addition of noise, and sharpen.

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