A grid-based invisible watermarking for .Jpeg images using least significant bit

Abstract

Internet is a one stop centre for users to download any media file such as image, audio and even videos. It is an excellent distribution system for digital media as it is inexpensive, eliminates warehousing and stock and user-friendly. However, there is an issue where user may copy or share the data illegally which eventually can increase the risk of privacy level of the media. Digital watermarking is introduced in order to solve the issue where it can provide copyright protection of the media and also to provide ownership that can be used to protect data from piracy. An efficient scheme of invisible watermarking is that it has to be able to overcome attacks on social media such in a way where when people download and crop any image from social media, the owner of the image can proof that the image is rightfully his. The loss of synchronization caused by geometrical modifications of an image, such as cropping, increases the difficulty of watermark detection, especially for invisible watermarking schemes. In this research, the Spatial Domain technique based algorithms were considered and two experiments were conducted in where one is text-based watermark embedding and another is image-based watermark embedding, The text-based watermarking method preserved the watermark after being uploaded and download to social media but decreases in terms of size of image. For the case of image-based watermark, the watermark was preserved for images with minimal colours or solid colours. It has also survived the watermark originality once being uploaded to social media.