Hardware assisted watermarking for multimedia

Digital media offer several distinct advantages over analog media, such as high quality, ease of editing, and ease of processing operations such as compression and high fidelity copying. Digital data is commonly available through digital TV broadcast, CD, DVD, and computing devices such as personal computers. The ease by which a digital media object can be duplicated and distributed has led to the need for effective digital rights management tools. Digital watermarking is one such tool. Watermarking is the process of embedding extra data called a watermark into a multimedia object, like image, audio, or video, such that the watermark can later be detected or extracted in order to make an assertion regarding the object. During the last decade, numerous software based watermarking schemes have appeared in the literature and watermarking research has attained a certain degree of maturity. But hardware based watermarking systems have evolved more recently only and they are still at their infancy. The goal of hardware assisted watermarking is to achieve low power usage, real-time performance, reliability, and ease of integration with existing consumer electronic devices. In this paper, we survey the hardware assisted solutions proposed in the literature for watermarking of multimedia objects. The survey is preceded by an introduction to the background issues involved in digital watermarking.