Copyright protection for images with EXIF metadata

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an application of robust watermarking with the aid of EXIF metadata in digital images. Application for robust watermarking is one of the major branches in digital rights management (DRM) systems. Furthermore, implementation schemes for robust watermarking generally alter selected pixels in the spatial domain, or corresponding coefficients in the transform domain, to accomplish the embedding process. We consider not only the pixels or coefficients in the images, but we also employ the EXIF metadata, which serves as the role of watermark, to further protect the copyrights. Taking the manufacturer, camera model, date and time stamp, and some other information in the EXIF metadata as the watermark information, conventional watermarking techniques can be applied to ordinary pictures taken by ourselves, and watermarked images with good quality can be produced. Even when the marked image has been intentionally modified, the original EXIF with selected information can be recovered from the watermark extraction process. Simulation results present the effectiveness of such an implementation.