Robust Digital Watermarking Techniques for Copyright Protection of Digital Data: A Survey

Digital watermarking has emerged as a potential solution to the copyright protection related issues of digital data. This paper presents key paradigms of research in robust watermarking techniques for copyright protection, copy protection, and authentication of digital multimedia. The main issues that derive research in robust watermarking schemes are imperceptibility, security, and robustness. The purpose of this paper is to provide a gist of robust watermarking schemes in the transform domain with the help of some brief theories proposed in the literature. Frequency transformation techniques such as DCT, DFT, and DWT, RDWT have been the most widely used methods to develop robust watermarking algorithms in the transform domain. The general framework of the watermarking system, recent application areas, characteristics, classification of information hiding methods, and various performance evaluation parameters considered by researchers have also been presented in this review. Broadly, this study reviews and compare performance summary of the several state-of-art robust watermarking methods available. This survey paper will be beneficial for the researchers keen to contribute to the field of robust digital watermarking particularly in the transform domain.