An NGram-Based Copyright Protection for Digital Images

Abstract

This paper introduces an NGram-based approach for digital images copyright protection. The advantage of the proposed approach compared to the existing works, is that it does not always require the whole elements (e.g., bits) of the watermark pattern to be embedded into the original digital image. This, in turn, allows us to protect the digital images while at the same time minimizing the chances of having low quality marked digital images. The best case occurs when no element of the pattern is embedded into the original digital image. In contrast, the worst case, which rarely happens, occurs when all elements are embedded into the digital image. Moreover, the use of an NGram approach allows us to efficiently and easily reach any part of the image using the corresponding level numbers and addresses. This makes it more efficient especially for complex and high-dimensional data (e.g., images and videos). Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of the ability to recover the watermark pattern from the marked digital image even if major changes are applied to the original digital image.