Literature Survey on Digital Watermarking Techniques

Authors: Rina Khande, Ashish Tiwar

Certificate: View Certificate

Abstract

Digital image watermarking is the technology that is used in information security applications like digital image content protection and copyright protection. In this paper, a brief review of literature on digital image watermarking is presented. Watermarking algorithms can be classified based on different criterions. Depending upon the specific application, watermarking algorithm should satisfy certain requirements .This paper presents a review on different digital watermarking techniques and their properties. The main reason for development of digital watermarking research is to protect intellectual properties of the digital world. Since the recent technology makes it easy copying the digital contents without any restrictions and editing without any prohibitive professional efforts. In the absence of protecting techniques, it difficult to rely on digital storage & communication system

Introduction

Digital watermarking is considered a potential technology to solve various challenges in the digital age. In addition to copyright protection, other potential uses of digital watermarking include content authentication, distribution tracking, and tamper recovery. In short, digital watermarking is perceived as a very relevant and widespread field in the field of digital content protection. The imperceptible watermark technology in digital image protection Since data and multimedia resources such as images, audio and video are mainly stored in digital formats, a foolproof mechanism for protecting valuable digital content is also important. There are two ways to achieve content protection: data encryption and watermarking. In data encryption, data is encrypted before transmission, and the decryption key is provided only to legitimate recipients. Encryption protects data during transmission. However, once the data arrives at the destination and is decrypted, it is no longer protected from unauthorized reuse. as a result, there is an urgent need for an another technology that can shield content even after decryption. Watermarking technology integrates watermarks that are inseparable from managed resources. Therefore, even after the content is decrypted and can be viewed in the public domain (such as the Internet), watermarking can protect the content. In this regard, the watermark mechanism can complement data encryption. Given the fact that digital data is extremely vulnerable to unauthorized modification, watermarking can provide a higher level of security for a person's valuable intellectual property (IP). In fact, the growing awareness of copyright protection of content has led to active research in digital watermarking [4,5,7]. Another area closely related to watermarking is data hiding. The term steganography refers to the process of using cover images to hide messages or data. The main purpose of data stored used in steganography is to use cover images to hide and transmit secret messages. Therefore, although both steganography and watermarking belong to the science of hidden information, they have different goals. Steganography can be considered as the art of conveying information without attracting attention. However, in the watermark, data is attached to the host data to protect or prove the ownership of the host data. However, the host or external data in steganography is only a carrier of important information, so it is not important. They are carefully designed so that the existence of other information remains hidden and unknown to the public. In general, watermarking is a data protection mechanism having certain similarities to data encryption and steganography. Notable difference is that watermarking does not restrict contact to data, while encryption makes data unintelligible to public who tries to access them. Moreover once encrypted data is decrypted, the data is vulnerable to the danger of open availability and illegal redistribution. On the other hand a Watermark is integrated permanently to reside in host data [1]. And whenever ownership of the data is questioned, the hidden ownership watermark information can be extracted to prove the rights.

Conclusion

The literature review presents the fact that there are large numbers of innovative and inventive watermarking approaches are available. Now research should be directed towards multi-objective watermarking schemes. Most of the proposed watermarking schemes are based on Human Visual System (HVS) using Just Noticeable Distortion (JND) for the selection of watermark positions. Further, the review reveals the fact that even though abundant information on watermarking schemes are published, a performance evaluation of various schemes is absent. Future work is also planned to perform a comparative performance evaluation of existing watermarking schemes. Digital audio and video watermarking techniques rely on the perceptual properties of a human auditory system (HAS) and human visual system (HVS) respectively. The HVS is less sensitive as compared to the HAS.