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A Robust Blind Quantum Copyright Protection Method for Colored Images Based on Owner’s Signature

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Abstract

Watermarking is the imperceptible embedding of watermark bits into multimedia data in order to use for different applications. Among all its applications, copyright protection is the most prominent usage which conceals information about the owner in the carrier, so as to prohibit others from assertion copyright. This application requires high level of robustness. In this paper, a new blind quantum copyright protection method based on owners’s signature in RGB images is proposed. The method utilizes one of the RGB channels as indicator and two remained channels are used for embedding information about the owner. In our contribution the owner’s signature is considered as a text. Therefore, in order to embed in colored image as watermark, a new quantum representation of text based on ASCII character set is offered. Experimental results which are analyzed in MATLAB environment, exhibit that the presented scheme shows good performance against attacks and can be used to find out who the real owner is. Finally, the discussed quantum copyright protection method is compared with a related work that our analysis confirm that the presented scheme is more secure and applicable than the previous ones currently found in the literature.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by Kermanshah Branch, Young Researchers and Elite club, IRAN. Also the authors would like to thank Mosayeb Naseri and Mohammad Rasoul Pourarian for their helpful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering, Imam Reza International University, Mashhad, Iran

    Monireh Houshmand

  2. Young Researchers and Elite Club, Kermanshah Branch, Islamic Azad University, Kermanshah, Iran

    Shahrokh Heidari & Reza Gheibi

  3. Department of Physics, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, 305-701, Korea

    Koji Nagata

Authors
  1. Shahrokh Heidari
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  2. Reza Gheibi
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  3. Monireh Houshmand
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  4. Koji Nagata
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Correspondence to Monireh Houshmand.

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Heidari, S., Gheibi, R., Houshmand, M. et al. A Robust Blind Quantum Copyright Protection Method for Colored Images Based on Owner’s Signature. Int J Theor Phys 56, 2562–2578 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10773-017-3412-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10773-017-3412-9

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