Data hiding technique for digital images tracing system on the Web

Online delivery of digital media, such as image or video is very popular and will become an increasingly important part of E-commerce copyright protection and tracking. The advantage of internet is sharing the valuable digital media which lead to misuse of digital media. To resolve the problem of misuse of digital data on Internet, we need to have strong Digital rights monitoring system. We propose an architecture design of digital image tracing system on the World Wide Web and a QR code hiding method for this application using 8×8 DCT-based transform. This paper presents an innovative embedding QR code that is a metadata hiding into digital image. In our design, there are 4 important components i.e., distributed web spider, target database, source database, and data hiding process module. We use the histogram of DC image parameter as indexing key in the target database, which will be used to retrieve the original image from the source database. DC image is obtained by taking all DC value of each 8×8 image block after DCT transform, which also serve as thumbnail version of the original. Besides to get the DC image, the operation of 8×8 DCT transform is also used to extract the metadata in the next process, which increases the efficiency of the overall system.