Image watermarking using visual cryptography

Copyright protection is a very important issue in our digital society, where a very large amount of multimedia data are daily generated and distributed using different kinds of consumer electronic devices and very popular communication channels, such as the Web and the social networks. In this chapter we describe some of the approaches that have been recently proposed for the copyright protection of digital images, exploiting the combination of watermarking techniques with visual cryptography schemes. The combined schemes take advantage of both techniques in terms of robustness and simplicity, and provide some important solutions for tampering verification and the resolution of disputes on the ownership of a given image.