ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the importance of digital rights management (DRM) and copyrighting images, and reviews the techniques defined in DRM for securing the image data and corresponding owners. It presents the broad classification of copyright marking methods, the generalized digital image watermarking framework, its performance criteria and metrics, and image watermarking tools. Digital watermarking as part of the DRM system provides mechanisms to represent/record/hide the copyright owner/distributor/distribution chain/purchaser in the images for the purpose of providing evidence in cases of copyright protection and copyright law enforcement. The general framework of digital image watermarking and the copyright authentication process is composed of three major components: the embedder, the extractor, and the correlator. The development of intelligent digital image watermarking techniques based on advanced machine learning, neural networks, artificial intelligence, and bio-inspired algorithms in conjunction with a variety of transforms is required for better trade-off among several requirements of watermarking.
