Improved unseen-visible watermarking for copyrigth protection of digital image

Abstract

Nowadays consumers of worldwide can capture digital image and video scene using several multimedia devices such as smartphones, tablets and cameras. Thus, the data captured may be easily copied or transmitted without any control and as consequence the intellectual property of the owner can be infringed, causing economic or moral damages. This fact suggests the necessity to develop security tools such as watermarking, to confront problems associated with the copyright protection. In this paper we propose an improved unseen-visible watermarking algorithm for copyright protection of digital color images. Unseen-visible watermarking is a recent approach that takes advantages of the visible and invisible watermarking, such as the readability and imperceptibility respectively, preserving the robustness of both. The design of the proposed method is based on Just Noticeable Difference (JND), Total Variation-based image decomposition and an image enhancement criterion. The watermark can be readable with a naked eye through the manipulation of image enhancement of the display device. Experimental results show that the scheme is effective for digital color images, preserving a high imperceptibility and its computational complexity is low.