A Novel Scheme for Digital Rights Management of Images Using Biometrics

摘要

The enormous development in digital technologies has necessitated the owners to pay great attention in protecting their digital contents. Recently, watermarking has been employed by researchers for the protection of digital documents. However the embedded watermark data can be easily hacked by the hackers and thus result as a threat to protection of digital content. In this paper, we have developed a novel scheme for protecting the copyrights of digital images by utilizing both biometrics and digital watermarking. In our scheme, the fingerprint biometric feature of the owner is used to generate the watermark. The minutiae points are extracted from the fingerprint and the coordinates of the minutiae points are represented as a matrix and are eventually utilized as watermark. The embedding and extraction of watermark is performed in the DCT-SVD domain. In case of any ownership dispute on the image, the watermark i.e., the coordinates of the minutiae points, is extracted from the watermarked image and compared against the coordinates of minutiae points extracted from the fingerprint of the person claiming ownership. If they match, the claiming person is the actual owner of the image. Thus the biometric feature utilized in our scheme ascertains the information to be very secure. Besides there is no necessity to carry the information and it cannot be hacked by the hackers as well.