Targeted Secret Disclosures in Visual-based Watermarking Concealment Systems

In this paper, a VWC-system (visual-based watermarking concealment system) is proposed. Besides the feature of watermarking system, the embedded information can hold the secret for the encryption key. This VWC-system works with frequency-domain watermarking technique, in conjunction with the concept of visual cryptography, in image processing. In the scheme, the embedded part is only a share which is a portion of the watermark generated from a chosen KFI (key feature image) by visual cryptography. The rest shares which are not used in embedded procedure are kept until the extraction procedure in order to reveal the targeted secret or copyright watermark shown in the message of watermark image. This proposed VWC-system offers a new application and novel watermark embedding process, for practical cryptosystem applications, offering improved security.