A Review on Digital Image Watermarking Techniques

Nowadays, Multimedia security [1] is a major issue. Images, video, audio, text files are losing their credibility day by day as they can be distorted or manipulated by using several tools. Ensuring the authenticity [2] and integrity of digital media is a major issue. The manipulation made by forgery tools are so smoothly done that we don’t even suspect that forgery may be involved in digital content. Multimedia data is facing several issues related to illegal distribution, duplication and manipulation of information conveyed by them. The digital watermarking [3] technique plays an important role in protecting digital content. In this paper, On the basis of their operating principles different watermarking techniques are categorized [4]. Attacks, applications and requirements [5] related to watermarking techniques are also discussed. Different watermarking techniques proposed by researchers for protecting copyrights of digital media are presented which are based on spatial and frequency domain. Frequency domain are getting much more attention due to use of wavelets which have high degree of resemblance to human visual system. In digital watermarking, secret information is embedded with original data for maintaining ownership rights of the digital content. Spatial domain watermarking techniques work over pixel characteristics and frequency domain watermarks concerned about different transformations that can be used with digital content. Imperceptibility, robustness, security, complexity and capacity are some requirements of the digital watermarking which completely depends on the algorithm used for watermarking.