Introduction to Watermarking Techniques and Applications

In this document, a robust and efficient digital image watermarking algorithm using the Fast Hadamard Transform (FHT) is proposed for the copyright protection of digital images. This algorithm can embed or hide an entire image or pattern as a watermark containing the owner’s copyright information directly into the original image. The attacks were tested on a test image of size 256x256x8 bits, embedded with a watermark image of size 32x32x8 bits. The simplicity of the fast Hadamard transform also offers a significant advantage in shorter processing time and ease of hardware implementation than other orthogonal transforms, such as the discrete cosine transform and wavelet transform. The results along with a conclusion and future scope are presented.