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Digital image ownership authentication via camouflaged unseen-visible watermarking

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Abstract

In recent years, end users can easily capture digital images using several devices, such as smartphones, mobile devices and digital imaging cameras, allowing such images to be easily copied, manipulated, transmitted or format converted without any restrictions. This fact suggests the necessity to develop digital tools, such as digital watermarking, to solve the issues associated with copyright protection and ownership authentication of digital images. To claim the ownership of a digital image, we propose a camouflaged, unseen-visible watermarking technique based on luminance and texture properties in conjunction with an image enhancement criterion. The proposed method has some advantages over invisible and visible watermarking methodologies in terms of readability and imperceptibility of the watermark, respectively. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is effective and applicable for digital images on a variety of topics, including natural scenes and man-made objects, both indoors and outdoors. A comparison with previously reported methods based on unseen-visible watermarking techniques is also provided.

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Acknowledgments

Authors thank the Instituto Politecnico Nacional (IPN) as well as the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnologia de Mexico (CONACYT) by the support provided during the realization of this research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto Politecnico Nacional SEPI ESIME Culhuacan, Avenida Santa Ana 1000, San Francisco Culhuacan Coyoacan, Ciudad de Mexico, Mexico

    Oswaldo Ulises Juarez-Sandoval, Manuel Cedillo-Hernandez, Mariko Nakano-Miyatake, Antonio Cedillo-Hernandez & Hector Perez-Meana

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  1. Oswaldo Ulises Juarez-Sandoval
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  2. Manuel Cedillo-Hernandez
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  3. Mariko Nakano-Miyatake
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Correspondence to Manuel Cedillo-Hernandez.

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Juarez-Sandoval, O.U., Cedillo-Hernandez, M., Nakano-Miyatake, M. et al. Digital image ownership authentication via camouflaged unseen-visible watermarking. Multimed Tools Appl 77, 26601–26634 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-018-5881-0

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