Digital data processing for intellectual property rights preservation over World Wide Web

The World Wide Web (WWW) provides a common framework for information exchange between different people. Everyone "publishes" texts, images, animation and video over the WWW, since it provides a cost-efficient way to disseminate knowledge and technology transfer. All this digital multimedia data can be duplicated without any loss of quality. The copy is identical to the master and the process of copying does not affect the quality of the master itself. With the increasing popularity of the Internet, especially with the hypertext based WWW, the possibility for everyone to access multimedia data has increased. Authors (that is developers or producers of digital data) should have a way to protect the intellectual property rights of their products. Image processing techniques have been presented in order to mark or "stamp" a digital product with the authors signatures. This paper introduces the current research solutions in the field of watermarking techniques, emphasizing three promising algorithms and a protocol for multimedia protection.