Muath Shakir Al-Ubaydi , Ahmed Sultan Al-Hegami, and  Taha Al-Rawhani

Department of Information Systems, Arab Academy for finance and banking, Sana'a, YEMEN

 Abstract
The Internet has today become the main channel to perform the e-business activities, and consequently, most of the products and services have been transformed from physical products/services to digital products/services, and the manner of delivery of such products (eg. Journals, certificates, images, advertising, video… etc) have been converted to the digital way. The ease of copying and transforming digital products generates an intellectual property problem; that means, the copying and transformation of digital products will be achieved without the permission of the owner or publisher. The digital watermarking is introduced to solve this intellectual property problem. Digital watermarking technique has been developed to protect the copyright of digital products (or digital media), such as audio, video, images and the multimedia documents. Copyright protection involves the authentication of ownership and the identification of illegal copies of digital media [7]. In this paper, we propose a copyright protection and fingerprinting scheme that met the main objectives: 1) Minimize the number of the original image blocks when we use the DCT transform in order to increase the speed of embedding process, (treatment of the capacity issue), 2) Raise the level of security by using unique Key to encrypt the watermark, 3) Increase the robustness to compression by JPEG and cropping, and, 4) Identify each image through buyer information (fingerprinting). We tested the proposed scheme and experiment with some common images and found the results quite promising.

Keywords
Digital watermarking, Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), encryption/decryption, image copyright protection, fingerprinting, Digital Intellectual Property.