Deliberate distortion of color image and video resources for copyright protection

The easiness of data-flow in digital media, seriously claims the ownership of intellectual material. To solve this problem, researchers have worked on different watermarking methods to embed ownership data into original signals. Unfortunately, none of the available techniques have been able to assure an acceptable level of security. Though, recently some senior members of the image processing community are expressing essential doubt about the appropriateness of watermarking for data protection and declare it more as a nonsecure tool for data embedding. In this paper, we propose a fast method for copy protection of color visual objects. The proposed method, deliberately embeds fake edges and color alterations into a given a color image in the way that it carries the content of the original image. Using this damaged image prevents the unauthorized users to pirate the demo version of images and video placed at homepages to help consumers select the images they wish to purchase. The main contribution of the proposed method is that there is a small key for the distorted image that reverts all degradations in a lossless manner. To the knowledge of the authors, this is the first time this kind of copy protection is addressed. While there are literally infinite ways to encrypt a given image, it is proved both experimentally and mathematically that there is no practical chance to crack the code