Abstract
Electronic watermarking can be traced back as far as
1954. The last 10 years has seen considerable interest in digital
watermarking, due, in large part, to concerns about illegal piracy
of copyrighted content. In this paper, we consider the following
questions: is the interest warranted? What are the commercial
applications of the technology? What scientific progress has
been made in the last 10 years? What are the most exciting areas
for research? And where might the next 10 years take us? In our
opinion, the interest in watermarking is appropriate. However, we
expect that copyright applications will be overshadowed by
applications such as broadcast monitoring, authentication, and
tracking content distributed within corporations. We further see
a variety of applications emerging that add value to media, such
as annotation and linking content to the Web. These latter
applications may turn out to be the most compelling. Considerable
progress has been made toward enabling these
applications—perceptual modelling, security threats and
countermeasures, and the development of a bag of tricks for
efficient implementations. Further progress is needed in methods
for handling geometric and temporal distortions. We expect other
exciting developments to arise from research in informed
watermarking.