Comprehensive review of watermarking techniques in deep-learning environments

Abstract

Recently, the demand for the generation, sharing, and storage of massive amounts of multimedia information—especially in the form of images—from different intelligent devices and sensors has increased drastically. This introduces issues including the illegal access and fraudulent usage of this information as well as other security concerns. Watermarking consists of embedding a watermark design in a digital cover and then later extracting it to provide a solution for ownership conflict and copyright violation issues involving the media data. Presently, in watermarking, the use of deep-learning approaches is incredibly beneficial due to their accuracy, superior results and strong learning ability. We present a comprehensive review of watermarking techniques in deep-learning environments. We start with basic concepts of traditional and learning-based digital watermarking; we later review the popular deep-learning model-based digital watermarking methods; then, we summarize and compare the most recent contribution in the literature; finally, we highlight obfuscation challenges and further research directions.