The Pros And Cons Of Digital Watermarking

Wide spread of the Information Technology in the recent past has replaced the analog images with digital images which are easy to produce, store and transfer through Internet. But it has increased the complexity in terms of security as digital format is easy to manipulate. As a result of the wide availability of both the Internet and some powerful image processing software, it is often difficult to determine whether an image is authentic or not. Thus the authentication and the copyright protection from unauthorized manipulation of digital image has become an essential concern in the digital multimedia era.

Digital watermarking techniques are one of the better solutions for both image authentication and Copyright protection. Digital watermarking is a technique of embedding a digital code into a cover

An image is said to be authentic if it has not been modified. Though Digital watermarking techniques are the best alternates for authentication, most watermarking techniques modify, and hence distort, the host image in order to insert authentication information. In many applications, loss of image fidelity is affordable as long as original and modified images are perceptually equivalent. But in some areas like medical, military, forensics, historical art imaging, remotely sensed images and legal imaging applications etc., where the need for authentication is often top priority, but they are equally concern about image quality. There are many misleading and misused incidents which are occurring these days with the unauthorized images. As an example in military, a recent scenario of image tampering is doctored photograph in which smoke condition of a war zone was deliberately thickened to increase the seriousness of a conflict [60]. All these factors have made digital media security a prominent research