Comparative Analysis of Relational Database Watermarking Techniques: An Empirical Study

Digital watermarking is considered one of the most promising techniques to verify the authenticity and integrity of digital data. It is used for a wide range of applications, e.g., copyright protection, tamper detection, traitor tracing, maintaining the integrity of data, etc. In the past two decades, a wide range of algorithms for relational database watermarking has been proposed. Even though a number of surveys exist in the literature, they are unable to provide insightful guidance to choose the right watermarking technique for a given application. In this paper, we provide an exhaustive empirical study and thorough comparative analysis of various relational database watermarking techniques in the literature. Our work is different from the existing survey papers as we consider both distortion-based and distortion-free techniques along with a rigorous experimental analysis demonstrating a detailed comparison on robustness, data usability, and computational cost with considerable empirical evidence.