General Concepts and State-of-the-Art

Digital watermarking is a multidisciplinary research area including disciplines like communications, signal processing, source coding, information theory, cryptography, and computer science. The variety of contributions from these different fields and the plurality of applications with similiar but not necessarily identical requirements easily confuses novices in digital watermarking. Therefore, the point of view taken in this book is clarified in this chapter. Models for digital watermarking at different levels of abstraction are introduced to obtain well-defined technical problems. Due to the diversity of the aspects involved in digital watermarking, an exhaustive discussion of the state-of-the art of the entire research of digital watermarking is beyond the scope of this book. However, an overview and brief description of previous fundamental work on digital watermarking and recent results is given as far as necessary.