Project Report Ee 371r Digital Image Processing

1. Introduction Digital watermarking is the process of conveying information by imperceptibly embedding it into the digital media. The purpose of embedding such information depends on the application and the needs of the owner/user of the digital media. Current main applications of watermarking include the following: 1. Copyright protection: The objective is to embed information about the source/owner of the digital media in order to prevent other parties from claiming the ownership of the media. 2. Fingerprinting: The objective of fingerprinting is to convey information about the recipient of the digital media (rather than the owner) in order to identify every single distributed copy of the media. This concept is very similar to serial numbers of software products. 3. Copy protection: Watermarking can be used to control data copying devices and prevent them from copying the digital media in case the watermark embedded in the media indicates that media is copy-protected. 4. Image authentication: The objective is to check the authenticity of the digital media. This requires the detection of modifications to the data. This project does not specifically focus on a single application of watermarking. Rather, it implements several different watermarking algorithms which may or may not be desirable for a variety of applications. However, I only focus on watermarking of images and leave the problem of video watermarking as future work.