A Study on a Digital Watermarking Method for Still Images

In this paper, we propose a watermarking method for still images using Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). Watermarking is a copyright protection technique for digital contents by hiding secret information into the contents. The proposed method embeds the watermark information into DCT coefficients. To obtain a watermarked image that is not only high quality but also has robustness for compression, we considered a method to change the degree of embedding by utilizing the activity of each DCT block. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme can obtain huh quality watermarked images and we can extract most of the embedded data even if they are compressed by JPEG scheme.