Abstract—Since the rise of the Internet one of the most important factors of information technology and communication has been the security of information. A special case of information hiding is digital watermarking. Digital watermarking is the process of embedding information into digital multimedia content such that the information (the watermark) can later be extracted or detected for a variety of purposes including copy prevention and control. Among numerous cryptographic solutions proposed in the past few years, secret sharing schemes have been found sufficiently secure to facilitate distributed trust and shared control in various communication applications. In this paper, a new image watermarking algorithm is developed using (n,n) secret sharing scheme for copyright protection. The proposed method embeds the copyright image into original image and is to be shared among n participants. Then the copyright image could be recovered using simple XOR operations without any loss. Experimental simulations are provided using MATLAB 7.1 to demonstrate the efficient performance of the developed technique in terms of reliability of watermark embedding and extraction. The scheme contains three phases: the copyright image embedding phase, embedded image secret sharing phase, copyright image extraction phase. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme can resist several attacks such as JPEG compression, resize and noise addition.

Index Terms—copyright protection, secret sharing, watermarking, steganography

Cite: Sushma Yalamanchili and M. Kameswara Rao, "Copyright Protection of Gray Scale Images by Watermarking Technique using (N,N) Secret Sharing Scheme," Journal of Emerging Technologies in Web Intelligence, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 101-105, May 2010. doi:10.4304/jetwi.2.2.101-105