A Study of Image Fingerprinting by Using Visual Cryptography

As digital media has made our life more colourful because of its advantages like easier to access, copy and distribute. But as what we have seen, series of malice activities like copyright infringement, counterfeiting, piracy and information distortion make damages to both the producers and the users of digital products. So we really need some technology to protect the copyright, authenticity, integrity of the digital products and the intellectual property of the users. There are many techniques such as Digital watermarking and Visual Cryptography both have been widely used for protection of data either in text, video, sound or digital images form in modern network time. Digital watermarking is an evolving field that requires continuous effort to find for the best possible method in protecting multimedia content. But Visual Cryptography is a special encryption technique to hide information in images in such a way that it can be decrypted by the human vision if the correct key image is used. Both techniques addresses the growing concerns of theft and tampering of digital media through the use of advanced signal processing strategies to embed copyright and authentication information within media content in their respective manner. In this paper we have discussed image fingerprinting with the help of visual cryptography technique. Keywords: Authentication, Digital Media, Digital Watermarking, Fingerprinting, Image, Piracy, Visual Cryptograph