Digital Image Watermarking Tools: State-of-the-Art

The concept of watermarks started with inserting logos into paper currency and legal documents. However, drastic improvements in digitization process, devices and broad band communication have made digital transmission of data inexpensive, fast and eased the way for data storage, access, distribution and retrieval. The net effect is that data is easily copied, edited and redistributed without proper acknowledgements to the content owners without loss of information. The present work addressed these concerns by providing an overview of existing image watermarking tools, associated features, functional limitation and scope of future research and development. It also suggested the suitability of tools towards class of users and briefed possible attacks on image watermarking.