21-09-2008, 11:06 AM
With the rapid growth of Internet and networks technique, multimedia data transforming and sharing is common to many people. Multimedia data is easily copied and modified, so necessity for copyright protection is increasing. It is the imperceptible marking of multimedia data to "brand" ownership. Digital watermarking has been proposed as technique for copyright protection of multimedia data. Digital watermarking invisibly embeds copyright information into multimedia data. Thus, digital watermarking has been used for copyright protection, finger printing, copy protection and broadcast monitoring. Indeed, a watermarking algorithm requires both invisibility and robustness, which exist in a trade-off relation. Thus good watermarking algorithm must be satisfied the requirements.
The process of digital watermarking involves the modification of the original multimedia data to embed a watermark containing key information such as authentication or copyright codes. The embedding method must leave the original data perceptually un-changed, yet should impose modifications which can be detected by using an appropriate extraction algorithm. Common types of signals to watermark are images, music clips and digital video. The application of digital watermarking to still images is concentrated here. The major technical challenge is to design a highly robust digital watermarking technique, which discourages copyright infringement by making the process of watermarking removal tedious and costly
