Visible Watermarking for Content Protection

Andrew Taylor, Richard Foster, Jason Pelly

Various digital rights management (DRM) techniques have been proposed for protecting digital content, ranging from denial technologies, such as encryption, to traceability technologies like fingerprint watermarking. This paper proposes a novel approach to DRM: a visible watermark embedded into image/video material, securing the content for preview purposes, done in a cryptographically secure manner that is also completely reversible. Knowledge of a key and a small amount of additional secret information allows the visible watermark to be removed, yielding an exact copy of the original, bit for bit. As well as discussing how visible watermarking can be performed, this paper examines various new business/security models resulting from adoption of visible watermarking.

Print ISSN
Electronic ISSN
2160-2492
Published
2003-02
Content type
Original Research
DOI
10.5594/J12414