5 Applications of Digital Watermarks

Digital watermarking is one of the ways of preventing software piracy in the digital world. It is defined as the process of embedding information into a digital media such as image or audio data to uniquely identify the copyright ownership of the media.

Digital data can easily be duplicated or manipulated by almost anyone, without affecting the wholeness of such material. This has given rise to a huge number of unseen copyright infringement issues. Digital watermarking however, provides an added layer of security to the content protection chain to deter unauthorized use/duplication of content by embedding watermarks that identify the original.

Digital watermarks are not only essential and useful for the purpose of software piracy prevention, they are potentially useful in many applications including the following:

5       Applications of Digital Watermarks

1. Content management: Digital watermarking enables effective content identification by providing a unique digital identifier to all forms of media content in a way that endures with the content wherever it may travel.
2. Copy control and Fingerprinting: Copy control and fingerprinting are used to prevent creations of illegal copies of the digital content. A digital media owner can embed a watermark into digital content that uniquely identifies buyer of each copy. If unauthorized copies are found later, the content owner can trace the origin of the illegal copies.
3. Broadcast Monitoring: Watermarking is a suitable technique for information monitoring especially in media broadcast, since other methods such as human observation are error prone and costly. The Watermark is placed within the content in a way that is compatible with the installed base of broadcast equipment, to ensure that they receive all of the air time which they purchase from broadcasters.
4. Transaction Tracking: It’s also referred to fingerprinting. Similar to the fingerprint that identifies an individual, each copy of a transaction is uniquely identified using digital watermark. The owner embeds different watermarks in each copy, so that if the work is misused, it will be easier to find the traitor.
5. Forensics: Watermarks are also used in forensics. Forensic watermark applications enhance a content owner’s ability to detect and respond to misuse of its assets. Digital watermarks are used not only to gather evidence for criminal proceedings, but also to enforce contractual usage agreements between a content owner and its content user.

Conclusion

Digital watermarking technique is a very useful technique and its applications are becoming widespread in the modern Information and Communications Society, as well as in the software product development industry.