Robustness and Security of Digital Watermarks

Digital watermarking is a nascent but promising technology that o#ers protection of unencrypted digital content. This paper is a brief technical survey of the multimedia watermarking landscape. The three main technical challenges faced bywatermarking algorithms are #delity, robustness and security. Currentwatermarking methods o#er possibly acceptable #delity and robustness against certain types of processing, such as data compression and noise addition, but are not su#ciently robust against geometric transforms such as scaling and cropping of images. Theoretical approaches have been developed that could lead to secure watermarking methods, but substantial gaps remain between theory and practice. 1 and School of Electrical Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853. 2 and Department of Computer Science, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544. 3 and Dept. of Computer Science, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093. 1 1 Introduction The merging..