Digital watermarking is a technique which allows an individual to add hidden Copyright notices or other verification messages to digital audio, video, or image signals and documents. Such hidden message is a group of bits describing information pertaining to the signal or to the author of the signal (name, place, etc.). The technique takes its name from watermarking of paper or money as a security measure. Digital watermarking is not a form of steganography, in which data is hidden in the message without the end user s knowledge, although some watermarking techniques have the steganographic feature of not being perceivable by the human eye.

While the addition of the hidden message to the signal does not restrict that signal s use, it provides a mechanism to track the signal to the original owner.

A watermark can be classified into two sub-types: visible and invisible. Visible watermarks change the signal altogether such that the watermarked signal is totally different from the actual signal, e.g., adding an image as a watermark to another image. Stock photography agencies often add a watermark in the shape of a copyright symbol ( © ) to previews of their images, so that the previews do not substitute for high-quality copies of the product included with a license.

Invisible watermarks do not change the signal to a perceptually great extent, i.e., there are only minor variations in the output signal. An example of an invisible watermark is when some bits are added to an image modifying only its least significant bits.

There are various spatial and frequency domain techniques used for adding watermarks to and removing them from signals. Purely spatial techniques are not robust to some attacks to the signal like cropping and zooming, whereas most frequency domain techniques and mixed-domain techniques are quite robust to such attacks.

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=Watermarking Companies=