Electronic watermarking can be traced back as far as 1954. The1990s have seen considerable interest in digital watermarking, due inlarge part to concerns about illegal piracy of copyrighted content. Inthis paper, we consider the following questions: is the interestwarranted? What are the commercial applications of the technology? Whatscientific progress has been made? What are the most exciting areas forresearch? And where might the first decade of the new century take us?In our opinion, the interest in watermarking is appropriate. However, weexpect that copyright applications will be overshadowed by applicationssuch as broadcast monitoring, authentication, and tracking contentdistributed within corporations. We further see a variety ofapplications emerging that add value to media, such as annotation andlinking content to the Web. These latter applications may turn out to bethe most compelling. Considerable progress has been made toward enablingthese applications-perceptual modelling, security threats andcountermeasures, and the development of a bag of tricks for efficientimplementations. Further progress is needed in methods for handlinggeometric and temporal distortions. We expect other excitingdevelopments to arise from research in informed watermarking
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