INTELLIGENT WATERMARKING SYSTEMS: A SURVEY

Digital watermarking techniques allow for the insertion of an imperceptible multi-bit payload into digitized multimedia data, such as video, image and audio. In contrast to other information hiding techniques, the payload carries information about the cover work, and apply to enforcement of authenticity and of integrity, media enhancement, etc. One of the key challenges to the practical application of digital watermarking, regards adapting these techniques to variations across different types of images. Early research in the area focused on exploring properties of each specific watermarking technique to improve performance. However, recent trends in research indicate that computational intelligence can be very beneficial for designing adaptive or intelligent watermarking techniques. Some evolutionary computation techniques have been developed to automatically set user-defined parameters of watermarking systems. In addition, machine learning techniques have recently been used to learn processes of these systems. These techniques affect a trade-off between robustness (against attacks), image quality, and system resources. In this chapter these techniques are reviewed and a case study is presented as a demonstration of their effectiveness.