Wavelet-based watermarking algorithms: theory, applications and critical aspects

Abstract

The copyright protection of digital images is a critical element for multimedia applications on Web, electronic libraries and virtual image galleries. Since the middle of the nineties, digital watermarking techniques have been proposed as a streamlined solution to solve the copyright problem. In this article we present the difficulties occurred during the construction and the experimentation of our wavelet-based watermarking algorithm. In fact we faced the classical watermarking problems such as computational cost, imperceptibility and robustness. In addition to these critical aspects we had to resolve problems concerning the application of watermarking techniques on a real database Web gallery.

Keywords:

• copyright protection
• digital colour image processing
• wavelets
• watermarking algorithm
• adaptive technique

2010 AMS Subject Classifications :

• 65T60
• 94A08

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by PRA Projects of University of Messina and GNCS of INdAM. We thank the IDS-Unitelm company of Messina and the Italian Catholic Bishop Conference for giving us the opportunity to use some images from BEWEB database in the experimentation phase.