An Overview of Digital Watermarking

This chapter discusses different aspects of digital watermarking. Digital watermarking is a branch of digital steganography and can be used in various applications, such as copyright protection, fingerprinting, copy control, broadcast monitoring., unauthorized modification, annotation and indexing, medical application, and covert communication. Steganography or data hiding is the art of embedding data inside a host medium without altering it. Watermarking schemes can be classified into two groups: based on watermarking properties, based on watermarking domain, and based on several key properties–– such as, robustness, security, complexity, imperceptibility, capacity, and detection. The chapter explains the various tools and mathematical background required in the design and performance analysis of digital watermarking techniques. Various data hiding schemes, such as private and blind data hiding are also focused in the chapter. . The chapter provides theoretical and practical ideas in the design, performance analysis, and applications of watermarking algorithm. It discusses information-theoretic predictions of the embedding capacity using different models, and presents the pros and cons of spatial and frequency domain watermarking algorithms. The chapter concludes by giving an account of security and robustness issues.