An Investigation into the Use of the Least Significant Bit Substitution Technique in Digital Watermarking

Digital imaging companies lose revenue each year to people who are illegally copying and using their images. One prevention mechanism is to digitally encode images making it difficult for others to copy. This could be done using digital fingerprinting or simply adding a visible watermark. The information is hidden in a way that should not attract attention, but make it very difficult to make an exact replica of the image. The information is encoded within a host image, so that the actual appearance of the image does not change, but within the image there is a watermark or secret message, which prohibits the attacker from making an exact copy. The objective with Steganography is not to change the actual message, or make it difficult to read, as cryptography does, rather to hide the existence of the message without distorting the carrier or the actual information. This study presents the results of implementing a Least Significant Bit (LSB) digital watermarking system.