Practical Applications of Watermarking

• The most usage of digital watermark is in field of protecting copyright, identifying criminals and military purposes. The digital watermark can be used in military and police organizations or in medical centers with reasonable cost.

• Digital watermark also can help to implement the copyright laws in order to protect intellectual property. But the numbers of countries which are used digital watermark in an acceptable level of usage are handful. In some countries the usage of watermarking is more prosper for instance in America, the military is used watermarking technology to protect itself radio communication. In some countries such as Switzerland where this technology is now used to do the issuance of driving license, identity papers and control of entering and leaving the country. The active companies of this field are mostly American or European. Digital Watermarking has variety of applications that the practical of them are: broadcast monitoring, owner identification, proof of ownership, transaction tracking, authentication, copy control, and device control . In following, the actual applications of them are listed below in form of brief.

• Broadcast monitoring

Watermarking can be useful in broadcast monitoring, because there are many requests from advertises, musicians and actors that if they receive their purchased air time from broadcasting firms or not. In 1997, a scandal broke out in Japan regarding television advertising. At least two stations had been routinely overbooking air time. Advertisers were paying for thousands of commercials that were never aired [9]. In order to achieve this requirement, first we should to exert a unique watermark in each video or sound clip, after that the automated monitoring stations by use those unique watermarks, can report to applicators (advertises, musicians and actors) that at what time and in which place your media appeared. There are a number of companies, such as Teletrax that provides watermark-base broadcast monitoring service from Philips.

• Owner identification and Proof of ownership

The owner by embedding its own identification in its media content that is an inseparable part of the content, and nobody can remove its identification code easily, and by this identification watermark, the real owner will be identified. For example The Digimarc corporation has marketed a watermarking system designed for this application. Their watermark embedder and detector are bundled with Adobe’s popular image processing program, Photoshop. When the detector finds a watermark, it contacts a central database to identify the watermark’s owner (who must pay a fee to keep the information in the database).

• Transaction tracking

Transactional watermarks, also called fingerprints, allow an IP (intellectual property) owner or content distributor to identify the source of an illegal copy by marking each legal copy of the document with a separate, unique watermark. If a document marked with a transaction watermark is misused (distributed illegally), the owner can find out who is responsible.

• Authentication

Modify the digital content is easier than prove the authentication of digital content. It is difficult but by using the invisible fragile watermark, the problem will be solved. As we studied the properties of fragile watermark in the categories of watermark section, if somebody made a slightly modification in the content, the fragile watermark will be destroyed and we can authenticate the content is valid or not.

• Copy control

For using watermarking in copy control of digital media, we need association of all the manufacturers of the recorder software, they should be able to implement watermark detection algorithms. If they have such capacity, so they don’t let to recopy of digital content which have watermark. There are commercial copy control software already in the market. Actually, what is offered by MarkAny is much more than just preventing illegal copying. Their product relies on watermarks to control Open, Download, and Print functions according to user authority even after content is opened by unauthenticated user.

• Device control

Device control is a broad category of applications in which specially designed device react to the watermarks they detect in content. In more recent application of watermarking for device control , Digimarc’s Mobile system is unique identifier into printed and distributed images such as magazine advertisements, packaging, tickets, and so on. After the image is recaptured by mobile‘s camera, the watermark is read by the software on the phone and the identifier is used to direct a web browser to an associated web site.