Performance Analysis for Reed Solomon Codes and Bose Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem Codes in Digital Image Watermarking

The objective of this paper is to explore the use of error correction codes in digital image watermarking for purposes of copyright protection. A comparative study between two error correction codes, Reed Solomon Code and Bose Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem Code was conducted to identify a more suitable error correction code to be used for this application. A bitmap image watermark was encoded with each chosen Error Correction Code, respectively then embedded on a color JPEG image. The effectiveness of each code was determined by the BER value obtained when the host image was subjected to several image manipulation attacks.