The First 50 Years of Electronic Watermarking
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he First 50 Years of Electronic Watermarking Ingemar J. Cox NEC Research Institute, 4 Independence Way, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA Email: [email protected]
Matt L. Miller NEC Research Institute, 4 Independence Way, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA Email: [email protected] Received 8 October 2001 and in revised form 28 October 2001 Electronic watermarking can be traced back as far as 1954. The last 10 years has seen considerable interest in digital watermarking, due, in large part, to concerns about illegal piracy of copyrighted content. In this paper, we consider the following questions: is the interest warranted? What are the commercial applications of the technology? What scientific progress has been made in the last 10 years? What are the most exciting areas for research? And where might the next 10 years take us? In our opinion, the interest in watermarking is appropriate. However, we expect that copyright applications will be overshadowed by applications such as broadcast monitoring, authentication, and tracking content distributed within corporations. We further see a variety of applications emerging that add value to media, such as annotation and linking content to the Web. These latter applications may turn out to be the most compelling. Considerable progress has been made toward enabling these applications—perceptual modelling, security threats and countermeasures, and the development of a bag of tricks for efficient implementations. Further progress is needed in methods for handling geometric and temporal distortions. We expect other exciting developments to arise from research in informed watermarking. Keywords and phrases: digital watermarking, data hiding, steganography.
1. INTRODUCTION In 1954, Emil Hembrooke of the Muzac Corporation filed a patent entitled “Identification of sound and like signals” [1] in which is described a method for imperceptibly embedding an identification code into music for the purpose of proving ownership. The patent states “The present invention makes possible the positive identification of the origin of a musical presentation and thereby constitutes an effective means of preventing such piracy, that is, it can be likened to a watermark in paper.” Electronic watermarking had been invented!1 Since that time, a number of watermarking technologies have been developed and deployed for a variety of applications. Interest in embedded signaling continued throughout the next 35 years. For example, systems were developed for advertisement verification and device control both of which are discussed in the next section. However, electronic water1 To the best of our knowledge, this is the earliest reference to electronic watermarking. We do cite a patent dated 1953 [2] later as an example of device control. However, the patent description is ambiguous as to whether this is really watermarking or not. If readers are aware of earlier technology, please let us know.
marking (particularly digital watermarking) did not receive substantial interest as a research topic until the 1990’s. In the
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