Abstract
We propose a secure watermarking scheme that integrates
watermarking with cryptography for addressing some important
issues in copyright protection. We address three copyright
protection issues—buyer-seller identification, copyright
infringement, and ownership verification. By buyer-seller
identification, we mean that a successful watermark extraction at
the buyer's end will reveal the identities of the buyer and seller
of the watermarked image. For copyright infringement, our proposed
scheme enables the seller to identify the specific buyer from whom
an illegal copy of the watermarked image has originated, and
further prove this fact to a third party. For multiple ownership
claims, our scheme enables a legal seller to claim his/her
ownership in the court of law. We will show that the combination
of cryptography with watermarking not only increases the security
of the overall scheme, but it also enables to associate identities
of buyer/seller with their respective watermarked images.