Visible watermarking with reversibility of multimedia images for ownership declarations

Digital watermarking technology is primarily the joining of the rightful owner of the protected media. Once the media are suspected to be illegally used, an open algorithm can be used to extract the digital watermark for the purpose of showing the media's ownership. From a hidden watermark in the media from the appearance point of view, general digital watermarking technologies can be divided into two categories: visible watermark technology and invisible watermark technology. Visual watermark technology embeds a watermark into the protected media to declare ownership and deter pirate behavior. In this paper, we propose a reversible visible watermark method, which embeds a binary-imaged watermark into gray-scale images to create a visible watermark. Not using complex calculations, this paper tries to simply change the pixel value to achieve the digital watermark, where our scheme is also against the possible detections with LSB-based manners in use. Furthermore, a reversible steganographic method is used to embed the watermarking information into the watermarking images. The watermark information can then be used to recover the original images.