A new buyer-seller watermarking protocol without multiple watermarks insertion

Watermarking protocols are designed for tracing illegal distributors when unauthorized copies are found. So far, most of the proposed schemes set up two or more watermarks embedded to a copy by the seller before it was sold. The main potential concerns of multiple watermarking are the image quality would be damaged and any earlier embedded watermarks would be destroyed as well. Thanks to visual cryptography which encodes the secret image into two shares, and recovers the secret by collecting these two shares. Therefore, a new buyer-seller watermarking protocol is proposed in this paper by applying the technique of visual cryptography to Lei et al.’s scheme so as to free from the disadvantages of multiple-watermarking insertion.