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Top1. Introduction
With the revolution of modern wireless communication there is a drastic breakthrough in the personal communication systems. This led to huge exchange of digital data between multimedia devices. Digital cameras, camcorders and scanners are some such devices to list. With these digital devices it is clear that it is possible to generate multimedia data in the form of pictures and videos (Bender et al., 1996; Fotopoulos et al., 2003; Potdar et al., 2005; Liu et al., 2005). As a result, for a reliable transmission and security of this digital data, several efficient compression algorithm and techniques for high speed and secured transmission are proposed. The concern of digital data is due to several advantages like good quality, ease of editing, simple storage technique and very simple mode of exchange without much loss in the data with better fidelity. However, in spite of these advantages, the digital multimedia data several suffer with ownership and originality certifications. The advantages, the digital multimedia data severely suffer with ownership and originality certification. The advantages discussed above are even favourable for easy duplication and further manipulation. This is often considered as a severe threat to the genuineness of the data and easily prone to misuse of the same. Considering this, it is suggested to verify the originality and reliability of the digital data while processing transmission and exchange of it.
It is the need of trending digital world that the owner of the digital data could ensure its ownership of it. Secured and protected against several unintended and illegal infringements. This scenario leads to deliberations concluding the need of a technology which can promise copy rights and avoid piracy of the digital data. The technology also should be capable of restricting the attempts of media pirates. In the recent past, several solutions were proposed to protect and secure multimedia data from piracy and unauthorised usage. This has been a challenging task for the researchers as it involves in several various solutions, one vital technique emerges as successful method of ensuring data protection. This technique involves in embedding secret data that significantly promotes the ownership of the multimedia in invisible form with the original digital media. This technique of hiding copy right certificate in the original data comes with different names like cryptography, steganography and water marking (Oliveira et al., 2002; Adesina et al., 2010). These are considered as subclasses of data security. Each method adopts unique technique for hiding the invisible data. Cryptography (Schneier, 1996; Koch et al., 1995; Anderson et al., 1996) technique involves in encryption and decryption.
The multimedia or the digital data is encrypted with a key known as decryption key. Only the original owner or the consumer in genuine will be holding the decryption key. However, this technique failed to control the infringements often the decryption takes place as the data is open to the world. Steganography on the other hand uses cryptographic algorithms to secure the digital data. This method is proved to be volatile and hot adaptive. The third popular method known as water marking (WM). This technique is considered to be robust when compared with the other two methods stated above. This WM technique ensure protection of digital data and its security against several 1D, 2D and 3D signal processing attacks. Hence WM, emerged a reliable mode of data transfer by which the multimedia data like image and video can be transferred and further distributed preserving the ownership over internet and public media. Considering the above, the current work focuses on WM based techniques for protecting color images.