Digital watermark

Abstract

The huge amount of multimedia contents available on the World-Wide-Web is beginning to raise the question of their protection. Digital watermarking is a technique which can serve various purposes, including intellectual property protection, authentication and integrity verification, as well as visible or invisible content labelling of multimedia content. Due to the diversity of digital watermarking applicability, there are many different techniques, which can be categorised according to different criteria. A digital watermark can be categorised as visible or invisible and as robust or fragile. In contrast to the visible watermark where a visible pattern or image is embedded into the original image, the invisible watermark does not change the visual appearance of the image. The existence of such a watermark can be determined only through a watermark ex¬traction or detection algorithm. The robust watermark is used for copyright protection, while the fragile watermark is designed for authentication and integrity verification of multimedia content. A watermark must be detectable or extractable to be useful. In some watermarking schemes, a watermark can be extracted in its exact form, in other cases, we can detect only whether a specific given watermarking signal is present in an image. Digital libraries, through which cultural institutions will make multimedia contents available, should support a wide range of service models for intellectual property protection, where digital watermarking may play an important role.