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Difference expansion based reversible watermarking algorithms for copyright protection of images: state-of-the-art and challenges

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Abstract

In the last two decades, there is a widespread and quick growth in the online connectivity globally, which has led to a steady increase in the sharing of multimedia content online. Illegal copying of data and its misuse has become common, and hence there is a rapid rise in research interests of developing a variety of authentication and data protection techniques. Digital watermarking has been used for years to copyright protect the Intellectual Property and is still a domain with lot of scope for research to suit its applicability to sensitive fields such as medical, military, aviation, satellite imagery, advertising, navigation, and designs, which are of very high resolution and demands undegraded transmission and storage. Many Reversible Watermarking (RW) techniques were developed for protection of such sensitive signals, of which Difference Expansion (DE) based methods became popular. This paper presents an extensive survey of reversible watermarking techniques based on DE algorithms for their characteristics, considerations, performance with respect to complexity, embedding capacity, perceptual impact, and fragility, to find the applicability of those algorithms. The paper also outlines the open research problems and provides some future directions for the researchers working in the related domain.

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  1. Department of ECE, Visvesvaraya Technological University (VTU) Research Center, K.S. Institute of Technology, Bangalore, 560109, India

    H. R. Lakshmi

  2. Department of ECE, K. S. Institute of Technology, Bangalore, 560109, India

    Surekha Borra

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Lakshmi, H.R., Borra, S. Difference expansion based reversible watermarking algorithms for copyright protection of images: state-of-the-art and challenges. Int J Speech Technol 24, 823–852 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10772-021-09818-y

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