A guide tour of video watermarking

Digital watermarking was introduced at the end of the 20th century to provide means of enforcing copyright protection once the use and distribution of digital multimedia data have exploded. This technology has first been intensively investigated for still images and recent efforts have been put to exhibit unifying characteristics. On the other hand, the situation is rather different in the context of video watermarking, where unrelated articles are scattered throughout the literature. The purpose of this paper is consequently to give an in-depth overview of video watermarking and to point out that it is not only a simple extension of still images watermarking. New applications have to be considered, specific challenges have to be taken up and video-driven approaches have to be investigated. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.