Pseudo Zero-Watermarking Algorithm Using Combination of Non-blind Watermarking and Visual Secret Sharing Scheme

This paper proposes a solution for digital image copyright protection technique using the combination of watermarking and visual encryption technique. In our solution, the copyright information (copyright logo) is distributed into n shares using k- out- of- n distributed algorithm, also called (k, n) visual secret sharing method. One of the shares is randomly selected to embed into the original image to prove the user’s copyright. The remaining n- 1 shares is used to register with Copyright Department. When claiming the copyright belongs to the user, the verifier only needs to extract the watermark information from the watermarked image, then decodes with any registered k- 1 shares from n- 1 shares for restoring copyright information. Experimental results of the proposed method compared with the method using only digital watermark show that our method has more practical effectiveness in the application of digital product copyright protection. © 2021, ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.