DIVESH SINGH

1610110112

DIGITAL WATERMARKING
Digital watermarking came to be in great demand when sharing information on the Internet
became a usual practice. Sharing files online, you never know if someone uses them without
your consent.

A digital watermark is a pattern of bits inserted into a digital file – image, audio or video. Such
messages usually carry copyright information of the file. Digital watermarking takes its name
from watermarking of paper or money. But the main difference between them is that digital
watermarks are supposed to be invisible or at least not changing the perception of original file,
unlike paper watermarks, which are supposed to be somewhat visible.

Watermarking has been around for several centuries, in the form of watermarks found initially
in plain paper and subsequently in paper bills. However, the field of digital watermarking was
only developed during the last 15 years and it is now being used for many different
applications.

APPLICATIONS OF WATERMARKING

One of the first applications for watermarking was broadcast monitoring. It is often crucially
important that we are able to track when a specific video is being broadcast by a TV station.
This is important to advertising agencies that want to ensure that their commercials are getting
the air time they paid for. Watermarking can be used for this purpose. Information used to
identify individual videos could be embedded in the videos themselves using watermarking,
making broadcast monitoring easier.
 The most important application is owner identification. Being able to identify the owner of a
specific digital work of art, such as a video or image can be quite difficult. Nevertheless, it is a
very important task, especially in cases related to copyright infringement. So, instead of
including copyright notices with every image or song, we could use watermarking to embed the
copyright in the image or the song itself.

Transaction tracking is another interesting application of watermarking. In this case the

watermark embedded in a digital work can be used to record one or more transactions taking
place in the history of a copy of this work. For example, watermarking could be used to record
the recipient of every legal copy of a movie by embedding a different watermark in each copy.
If the movie is then leaked to the Internet, the movie producers could identify which recipient
of the movie was the source of the leak.

TYPES OF WATERMARKING

Speaking of digital image watermarking, we can divide watermarks into two main groups
– visible and invisible watermarks.

A visible watermark is a visible semi-transparent text or image overlaid on the original image. It
allows the original image to be viewed, but it still provides copyright protection by marking the
image as its owner’s property. Visible watermarks are more robust against image
transformation (especially if you use a semi-transparent watermark placed over whole image).
Thus they are preferable for strong copyright protection of intellectual property that’s in digital
format.

An invisible watermark is an embedded image which cannot be perceived with human’s eyes.
Only electronic devices (or specialized software) can extract the hidden information to identify
the copyright owner. Invisible watermarks are used to mark a specialized digital content (text,
images or even audio content) to prove its authenticity.
DIGITAL WATERMARKING LIFE CYCLE PHASES

The information to be embedded in a signal is called a digital watermark, although in some

contexts the phrase digital watermark means the difference between the watermarked signal
and the cover signal. The signal where the watermark is to be embedded is called
the host signal. A watermarking system is usually divided into three distinct steps, embedding,
attack, and detection. In embedding, an algorithm accepts the host and the data to be
embedded, and produces a watermarked signal.

Then the watermarked digital signal is transmitted or stored, usually transmitted to another
person. If this person makes a modification, this is called an attack. While the modification may
not be malicious, the term attack arises from copyright protection application, where third
parties may attempt to remove the digital watermark through modification. There are many
possible modifications, for example, lossy compression of the data (in which resolution is
diminished), cropping an image or video, or intentionally adding noise.

Detection (often called extraction) is an algorithm which is applied to the attacked signal to
attempt to extract the watermark from it. If the signal was unmodified during transmission,
then the watermark still is present and it may be extracted. In robust digital watermarking
applications, the extraction algorithm should be able to produce the watermark correctly, even
if the modifications were strong. In fragile digital watermarking, the extraction algorithm
should fail if any change is made to the signal.

REFERENCES
https://bytescout.com/products/enduser/watermarking/digital_watermark_types.html
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/0910/R08/work/essay-ma485-watermarking.pdf
https://www.techopedia.com/definition/24927/digital-watermarking
https://www.watermark-image.com/watermarking.aspx
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/digital-watermarking