The use of watermarks in the protection of digital multimedia products

The watermarking of digital images, audio, video, and multimedia products in general has been proposed for resolving copyright ownership and verifying originality of content. This paper studies the contribution of watermarking for developing protection schemes. A general watermarking framework (GWF) is studied and the fundamental demands are listed. The watermarking algorithms, namely watermark generation, embedding, and detection, are analyzed and necessary conditions for a reliable and efficient protection are stated. Although the GWF satisfies the majority of requirements for copyright protection and content verification, there are unsolved problems inside a pure watermarking framework. Particular solutions, based on product registration and related network services, are suggested to overcome such problems.