A Study of Image Watermarking Schemes with Enhancement in Payload

Nowadays various multimedia data are available in digital form. The creators of such data are reluctant to allow their distribution in a networked environment because of the problems of theft of intellectual property. Copyright protection of the multimedia data can be achieved by means of cryptography techniques. But, once the encryption is removed there is no more protection for the data. Research is being carried out to find ways to effectively hide copyright information permanently into the digital media which can be extracted later to identify the rightful owner of the data. This is to spot the copyright violators.Steganography is the art of hiding a secret information in a multimedia data. Though both steganography and watermarking denote techniques that are used to imperceptibly convey information by embedding it into the cover data, steganographic methods deal with only invisible data whereas the watermarking deals with both visible and invisible data. This book deals with techniques to enhance the number of bits embedded without compromising on the other requirements.