Efficient Watermarking Strategies

Abstract

Digital watermarking today is used in various applications. Copyright protection for online shops by customer identification watermarking, also called transaction watermarking, may be the most prominent example for this, offering an alternative to more restrictive digital rights management approaches. But in order to enable efficient transaction watermarking, a new challenge for applied algorithms arises: Besides the common requirements of transparency and robustness a very fast embedding strategy is necessary as otherwise users would face unacceptable delays before they can download their marked content. This can be addressed either by designing algorithms of very low complexity or by choosing suitable support mechanisms to speed up watermark embedding. The first approach is still an open challenge as watermarking algorithms of low complexity today fail to provide high robustness and transparency. We therefore provide an introduction to three strategies to support fast watermark embedding: Container watermarking based on pre-calculations which today is already used in industrial applications, client-server watermarking where the content is marked after the transfer to the customer and grid watermarking using the computational power of grid networks.