Digital image watermarking: an overview

Abstract

Usage of digital media has witnessed a tremendous growth during the last decades, as a result of their notable benefits in efficient storage, ease of manipulation and transmission. However these features make digital media vulnerable to copyright infringement, tampering and unauthorized distribution. In the last five years the protection of digital information has received significant attention within the digital media community, and a number of techniques that try to address the problem by hiding appropriate information (e.g. copyright or authentication data) within digital media have been proposed. In this paper we review data hiding techniques for copyright protection of still images and describe some recent research results in this field.