JPEG digital watermarking for copyright protection

With the rapid growth of the multimedia technology, copyright protection has become a very important issue, especially for images. The advantages of easy photo distribution are discarded by their possible theft and unauthorized usage on different websites. Therefore, there is a need in securing information with technical methods, for example digital watermarks. This paper reviews digital watermark embedding methods for image copyright protection, advantages and disadvantages of digital watermark usage are produced. Different watermarking algorithms are analyzed. Based on analysis results most effective algorithm is chosen – differential energy watermarking. It is noticed that the method excels at providing image integrity. Digital watermark embedding system should prevent illegal access to the digital watermark and its container. Requirements for digital watermark are produced. Possible image attacks are reviewed. Modern modifications of embedding algorithms are studied. Robustness of the differential energy watermark is investigated. Robustness is a special value, which formulae is given further in the article. DEW method modification is proposed, it’s advantages over original algorithm are described. Digital watermark serves as an additional layer of defense which is in most cases unknown to the violator. Scope of studied image attacks includes compression, filtration, scaling. In conclusion, it’s possible to use DEW watermarking in copyright protection, violator can easily be detected if images with embedded information are exchanged