Robust authentication scheme for protecting copyrights of images and graphics

Watermarking techniques are primarily used for copyright protection. A simple and robust watermark-like digital authentication scheme is proposed. This work has two major merits. First, the watermark used in the proposed authentication scheme is the same type used in the original image, e.g. grey level images. Second, the proposed scheme meets the requirements for watermarking techniques. Illegal users cannot perceive and break the watermark signed from the original image. Furthermore, the signed watermark is robust against attacks by many image altering algorithms, such as filtering, lossy compression, rotation and scaling. The proposed scheme is not only suitable for ordinary natural images, but also for cartoon graphics.