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In this paper, a new digital watermarking method based on vector quantization (VQ) is proposed. In contrast with conventional VQ‐based watermarking schemes, the mean of sub‐blocks is used to train the VQ codebook. In addition, the Anti‐Gray Coding (AGC) technique is employed to enhance the robustness of the proposed watermarking scheme. In this scheme, the secret keys are used to hide the associated information between the original image and the watermark. Then the set of secret keys will be registered to a trusted third party for future verification. Thus, the original image remains unchanged after the watermark is melted into the set of secret keys. Experimental results show that the watermark can survive various possible attacks. Besides that, the size of the secret keys can be reduced.

The JPEG image is the most popular file format in relation to digital images. However, up to the present time, there seems to have been very few data hiding techniques taking the JPEG image into account. In this paper, we shall propose a novel high capacity data hiding method based on JPEG. The proposed method employs a capacity table to estimate the number of bits that can be hidden in each DCT component so that significant distortions in the stego‐image can be avoided. The capacity table is derived from the JPEG default quantization table and the Human Visual System (HVS). Then, the adaptive least‐significant bit (LSB) substitution technique is employed to process each quantized DCT coefficient. The proposed data hiding method enables us to control the level of embedding capacity by using a capacity factor. According to our experimental results, our new scheme can achieve an impressively high embedding capacity of around 20% of the compressed image size with little noticeable degradation of image quality.

In this paper, we shall propose a new method for the copyright protection of digital images. To embed the watermark, our new method partitions the original image into blocks and uses the PCA function to project these blocks onto a linear subspace. There is a watermark table, which is computed from projection points, kept in our new method. When extracting a watermark, our method projects the blocks of the modified image by using the PCA function. Both the newly projected points and the watermark table are used to reconstruct the watermark. In our experiments, we have tested our scheme to see how it works on original images modified by JPEG lossy compression, blurring, cropping, rotating and sharpening, and the experimental results show that our method is very robust and indeed workable.

Smart card has been adopted to various applications. In 2000, Hwang and Li proposed a remote user authentication scheme, which is also using smart card. Nine months later, Chan and Cheng pointed out that there is a weakness in the remote authentication scheme proposed by Hwang and Li. In this paper, we show that Chan and Cheng's attack does not work well because they did not consider the format of user's identity. In addition, we propose several ways to solve the problem of Chan and Cheng's attack.