Opportunities for watermarking standards
Fred Mintzer, Gordon W. Braudaway, Alan E. Bell · Communications of the ACM · 1998
The article reports that watermarking involves embedding data, often imperceptibly, into a media or multimedia object to enhance or protect its value. While the field is relatively new, many applications that could benefit from watermarking have already been proposed. The article also explores some ways the proposed applications might benefit from standards, as well as efforts now under way to develop a watermarking standard to protect digital video material. Three applications with similar technical requirements are identified as one uses watermarking to convey ownership information, another uses watermarking to verify that object content has not changed, and the third, called collaborative watermarking, conveys object-specific information to a community of recipients. Greatest needs and opportunities for watermarking standards involve invisible watermarking. Ownership and authentication application clusters often interact with encryption systems for watermark key management. Copy protection of digital video is a pioneering application of collaborative watermarking that has inspired a companion pioneering standards effort.