TABLE OF CONTENTS Hsiang-Cheh Huang, Hsueh-Ming Hang, and Jeng-Shyang Pan
A typical application of digital watermarking is to identify the ownership of a multimedia object or content by embedding the owner mark, or the watermark, into it. Most multimedia applications require imperceptible and robust watermarks. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview on the current watermarking techniques together with some useful Internet resources. We will describe several representative concepts and examples in image watermarking. The ideas for video and audio watermarking can be derived from image watermarking, and there are several chapters in this book specializing in these applications. In addition, we will cover the attacks that tamper watermarks and the theoretical aspects of watermarking with some benchmarks. We hope that the readers, after going through this chapter, will learn the fundamentals of watermarking and its current status, and will be ready to explore this subject with the aid of the contents in the rest of this book further.
Owning to the popularity of Internet connection, the demand for embedding securely owner identity and other information into multimedia becomes very urgent. The protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights for digital multimedia has become an important issue. The modern digital watermarking technology has a rather shorthistory since 1993 (Tirkel et al. 1993, Tirkel and Hall 2001). It is reported...
