A review of digital watermarking approaches for forensic applications

There has been remarkable growth in the digital domain. This has led to the production of a huge amount of digital data in the form of text messages, documents, audio/speech signals, digital images, videos, etc. In forensics, digital information (i.e., images of crime scenes, etc.) is very important to examine cases and collect the proof regarding the incident. This further leads to judge the victims and culprits by the court for appropriate actions. So, even a slight change (intentional/unintentional) may lead to the wrong judgement. Several digital signal processing tools are easily available to process this type of digital data, which means data may get disrupted, altered, or deform in such a way that the authenticity gets compromised. In such cases, it can be difficult to recognize the source information as well as to check the originality/intactness of the digital data. In the recent past, several techniques have come into existence to protect digital data against security issues. Steganography, cryptography, and watermarking are examples of security techniques, which have been widely used for data security and forensic applications for a long time. Specifically, digital watermarking techniques provide many useful features to help users regarding data security and authentication without affecting other data characteristics. This work is an attempt to provide a review of recent digital image watermarking approaches for forensic applications.