A Survey of Watermarking Techniques for Non-Media Digital Objects (Invited Talk)

The vast majority of the literature on watermarking has dealt with media such as images, video, and audio – all of which are ultimately destined for consumption by the human perceptual system. There has recently been growing interest in watermarking non-media such as relational data, software, natural language text, sensor streams, etc. The challenges posed by these new domains are quite different from the traditional ones. For example, some (like relational data and software) are destined for automated processing rather than for perception by a human. Others (like natural language text) are destined for human consumption, but by the cognitive rather than the perceptual system. Streaming data poses its own set of challenges. The talk will survey these areas, their problematics, the progress made, and the remaining challenges. Copyright c ©2003, Australian Computer Society, Inc. This paper appeared at Twenty-Sixth Australasian Computer Science Conference (ACSC2003), Adelaide, Australia. Conferences in Research and Practice in Information Technology, Vol. 16. Michael Oudshoorn, Ed. Reproduction for academic, not-for profit purposes permitted provided this text is included. Portions of this work were supported by Grants IIS-0325345, IIS-0219560, IIS-0312357, and IIS-0242421 from the National Science Foundation, Contract N00014-02-1-0364 from the Office of Naval Research, by sponsors of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security, and by Purdue Discovery Park’s e-enterprise Center.