Robust image watermarking theories and techniques: A review

Over the past several decades, digital information science has emerged to seek answers to the question: can any technique ensure tamper-resistance and protect the copyright of digital contents by storing, transmitting and processing information encoded in systems where digital content can easily be disseminated through communication channels? Today it is understood that the answer is yes. This paper reviews the theoretical analysis and performance investigation of representative watermarking systems in transform domains and geometric invariant regions. Digital watermarking is a technology of embedding watermark with intellectual property rights into images, videos, audios, and other multimedia data by a certain algorithm. The basic characteristics of digital watermark are imperceptibility, capacity, robustness and false positive of watermarking algorithm and security of the hiding place. Moreover, it is concluded that various attacks operators are used for the assessment of watermarking systems, which supplies an automated and fair analysis of substantial watermarking methods for chosen application areas.