An effective blind watermarking scheme for protecting rightful ownership of digital images

In modern times, the rapid growth of the Internet has made copyright protection of digital contents a critical issue. A Digital Rights Management (DRM) system is aimed at protecting the high-value digital assets and controlling the distribution and utilization of those digital assets. Watermarking technologies are being regarded as a vital mean to proffer copyright protection of digital images. Digital watermarking hides, in digital images, the information necessary for ownership identity to offer copyright protection. This paper proposes an innovative invisible and blind watermarking scheme for copyright protection of digital images with the purpose of defending against digital piracy. In the proposed watermarking scheme, a binary watermark image is invisibly embedded into the host image for achieving copyright protection. In watermark embedding, every pixel of the watermark image is embedded into the individual blocks of the host image sized 2×2. In the proposed watermarking scheme, the process of watermark extraction necessitates only the watermarked image and it doesn´t require the original image or any of its characteristics, and hence, the proposed watermarking scheme is blind. The efficiency of the proposed watermarking scheme has been demonstrated via the experimental results.