An authentication watermarking scheme with transaction tracking enabled

Business intelligence and customer satisfaction would be two key factors that would be used by the digital media commerce companies. For business intelligence purpose annotations for transaction tracking are required and the customers want that the digital media be authentic. In this paper, we present a novel watermarking scheme that supports authentication and transaction tracking functionalities. The watermarking scheme makes use of finite state machine principles. The proposed scheme is blind and asymmetric as it does not require the original image for watermark extraction and the watermark extraction key is different than its embedding key. The algorithm is implemented and tested for its visual quality, compression overhead, execution time overhead and pay load capacity. It is found that the algorithm has high visual quality, high payload capacity, low compression overhead and low execution time overhead. © 2007 IEEE.