• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.33 no.3C
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• pp.262-270
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• 2008

We propose a technique to protect digital images using the magnitude and orientation of their edges. The proposed technique uses the content-associated copyright message generated by combining the original copyright message with the magnitude and orientation of some edges of a digital image. It enables the distribution of the original copyright message without any distortion of original digital images by avoiding embedment of the original copyright message into images. In addition to the advantage in the image quality, it also has a relatively low computational complexity by using simple operations to generate the content-associated copyright message. To verify the proposed technique, we performed experiments on its robustness to the external attacks such as histogram equalization, median filtering, rotation, and cropping. Experimental results on restoring the copyright message from images distorted by attacks show that more than 90%, on the average, can be recovered.