Watermarking for IPR protection of the Tuscany and Gifu Art Virtual Gallery
F. Bartolini, Roberto Caldelli, Vito Cappellini, Alessia De Rosa, Manami Wada, Alessandro Nozzoli, Alessandro Piva · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1999
Digital watermarking has been indicated as a technique in the position to cope with the problem of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) protection of images; this result should be achieved by embedding into the data an unperceivable digital code, namely the watermark, carrying information about the copyright status of the work to be protected. In this paper, the practical feasibility of IPR protection through digital watermarking is investigated. The most common requirements application scenarios impose to the watermarking technology to satisfy are discussed. Watermarking schemes are first classified according to the approach used to extract the embedded code and then the impact, such a classification has on watermark usability, is investigated form an application point of view. As it will be shown, the effectiveness of watermarking as an IPR protection tool turns out to be heavily affected by the detection strategy, which as to be carefully matched to the application at hand. Finally, the practical case of the Tuscany and Gifu Art Virtual Gallery has been considered in detail, to further explain in which manner a watermarking technique can be actually used.