A blind watermarking algorithm based on fractional Fourier transform and visual cryptography

This paper presents a robust copyright protection scheme based on fractional Fourier transform (FrFT) and visual cryptography (VC). Unlike the traditional schemes, in our scheme, the original image is not modified by embedding the watermark into the original image. We use the visual secret sharing scheme to construct two shares, namely, master share and ownership share. Features of the original image are extracted using SVD, and are used to generate the master share. Ownership share is generated with the help of secret image (watermark) and the master share, using VC technique. The two shares separately give no information about the secret image, but for ownership identification, the secret image can be revealed by stacking the master share and the ownership share. In order to achieve the robustness and security, the properties of VC, FrFT and SVD are used in our scheme. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme is strong enough to resist various signal processing operations.

► A blind watermarking scheme based on FrFT and VC is proposed in this paper.
► The scheme is lossless in nature, i.e. original image is not modified.
► The transform orders of the fractional Fourier transform are used as secret keys.
► Without knowing the correct keys no attacker can extract the correct data.
► The proposed scheme is highly robust and secure.