Images make up a major component of multimedia content. Digital arts, illustrative diagrams, cultural heritage paintings in digitized for and digital photographs are examples of images. Advances in computing hardware, software, and computer networks have created threats to copyright protection and content integrity. In this paper, a new method for lossless visible watermarking is proposed by using appropriate compound mappings that allow mapped values to be controllable. The mappings are proved

more »

... to be reversible for lossless recovery of the original image. The approach is generic, leading to the possibility of embedding different types of visible watermarks into cover images. Two applications of the proposed method are demonstrated, where opaque monochrome watermarks and non uniformly translucent full-color ones are respectively embedded into color images.