Digital Watermarking

What Does Digital Watermarking Mean?

Digital watermarking is the method of embedding data into digital multimedia content. This is used to verify the credibility of the content or to recognize the identity of the digital content’s owner.

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Digital watermarking can be employed for multiple purposes, such as:

  • Copyright protection
  • Source tracking
  • Broadcast tracking, such as watermarked videos from global news organizations
  • Hidden communication

Techopedia Explains Digital Watermarking

There are two types of digital watermarking:

  • Visible Digital Watermarking: Visible data is embedded as the watermark. This can be a logo or a text that denotes a digital medium’s owner.
  • Invisible Digital Watermarking: The data embedded is invisible or, in case of audio content, inaudible.

Robust watermarks involve blending signal amplitude with large bandwidth sizes and a short message length. Frequency domain capabilities and mixed-domain techniques, when added to signals, are believed to provide the right amount of robustness in order to guard against watermark attacks.

The publisher Playboy has used an invisible form of digital watermarking to detect where its copyrighted material has been illegally posted on other websites.

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Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…