Progressive image transmission (PIT) can be commonly encountered
in the browsers due to the bandwidth consumption of different users. With the
digital nature of images, they can be easily copied and spread, and hence
copyright protection of progressively transmitted images would be needed. We
make use of the QR code to hide the copyright information, and apply the visual
secret sharing method for embedding secret data into different layers of color
images for progressive transmission. Simulation results have presented the
acceptable quality of marked images for progressive transmission, and the
copyright protection with QR code and secret sharing. The proposed technique
can be practical and easily implementable for copyright protection of
progressive image transmission.