Robust copyright protection of satellite images using a novel digital image-in-image watermarking algorithm

In this paper, a novel digital watermarking technique for copyright protection of satellite images is presented. This robust technique can survive a number of image manipulations or "attacks" such as contrast stretching, rotation, clipping and filtering to the watermarked image. Conventional digital watermarking techniques use a number of bits or characters to be embedded into the image. However, many of these techniques would yield to some minor attacks to the watermarked image due to the alteration of the values of these bits or characters. As a result, the legal ownership of the data under copyright protection would be questionable. The performance of any digital watermarking algorithms depends on the tradeoff between data integrity and the robustness of the algorithms.