Context based watermarking of secure JPEG-LS images

JPEG-LS is generally used to compress bio-medical or high dynamic range images. These compressed images sometime needs to be encrypted for confidentiality. In addition, the secured JPEG-LS compressed images may need to be watermarked to detect copyright violation, track different users handling the image, prove ownership or for authentication purpose. In the proposed technique, watermark is embedded in the context of the compressed image while the Golomb coded bit stream is encrypted. The extraction of watermark can be done during JPEG-LS decoding. The advantage of this watermarking scheme is that the media need not be decompressed or decrypted for embedding watermark thus saving computational complexity while preserving the confidentiality of the media.