Securing Digital Media via Watermarking: Applications in Healthcare, Surveillance, Communication

Abstract

When digital media is pervaded?in all of modern life including such critical areas as healthcare, surveillance and secure communication, the demand for strong, scalable and intelligent way for protecting the information embedded in digital media can never be more greatly felt. Digital watermarking has become a significant tool to embed invisible?security features into multimedia data, providing authentication, tracing, and tamper resistance. This survey focuses on the applications to watermarking, considering its use in a comprehensive review of?three important fields of interest, namely, medical imaging, surveillance systems and secure communications. The paper also emphasizes the specific needs and limitations of the scenarios, e.g., reversibility in the health care, real-time decision?making in surveillance, and robustness in the communication network. An extensive review of the current state of the art, weighing advantages against drawbacks, is then introduced, paving the way for the proposition of a unified,?domain-adaptive watermarking methodology, deployable across multiple sectors. The paper concludes with the open issues in the field, such as AI based watermarking, blockchain-based verification, 3D media protection?and quantum watermarking. By refocusing from comparative techniques to?applications, the goal of this review is to bring the innovative academic research toward security-driven applications. The learned insights provided play a role of a compass for investigators and practitioners targeting the next generation of?secure, interoperable, and intelligent watermarking solutions.

Introduction

As digital multimedia (images, videos, audio) becomes integral in healthcare, surveillance, and communication, concerns around security, authenticity, ownership, and integrity have intensified. Traditional encryption protects data in transit but fails once content is accessed. Digital watermarking addresses this by invisibly embedding information—such as ownership credentials or tamper alerts—into media, ensuring ongoing protection and traceability.

Core Concepts and Techniques

• Types:

  • Robust: Resists compression/tampering (e.g., copyright).

  • Fragile: Detects slightest changes (e.g., tamper detection).

  • Reversible: Recovers original data (vital in medical/legal domains).

  • Semi-fragile: Allows minor processing but detects malicious edits.

• Domains:

  • Spatial Domain: Modifies pixel values (e.g., LSB).

  • Transform Domain: Embeds data in frequency components (e.g., DWT, DCT, SVD).

• Performance Metrics:

  • Imperceptibility, Robustness, Security, Capacity, Complexity.

Key Application Areas

1. Healthcare Imaging

• Uses: Embeds patient data, protects DICOM images, ensures telemedicine authenticity.

• Techniques: Reversible watermarking (e.g., DWT-SVD, histogram shifting) to preserve diagnostic quality.

• Challenges: Reversibility, real-time processing, compliance with standards (e.g., HIPAA).

2. Surveillance & Forensics

• Uses: Verifies chain-of-custody, authenticates crime footage, embeds timestamps and GPS in bodycams/drones.

• Techniques: Region-based and compressed domain watermarking for real-time video; semi-fragile for tamper detection.

• Challenges: Low latency, interoperability across sources, legal admissibility.

3. Secure Communication Systems

• Uses: Authenticates transmitted content post-decryption, protects digital rights, traces leaks.

• Techniques: Spread Spectrum, QIM, hybrid (DWT-DCT-SVD), user-specific watermarking.

• Challenges: Bandwidth limits, synchronization, dynamic content handling, blind detection.

Trends & Innovations

• AI-driven watermarking for adaptive embedding and tamper detection.

• Blockchain integration for decentralized verification.

• Edge and IoT watermarking for lightweight, real-time use.

• Quantum watermarking under exploration for ultra-secure communication.

Challenges and Open Issues

• Lack of standardization across industries (e.g., DICOM vs MPEG).

• Trade-offs between capacity and media quality.

• Limitations in blind watermark extraction.

• Adversarial AI attacks and privacy concerns in embedding sensitive info (e.g., patient data).

Proposed Unified Framework

A modular architecture is proposed to handle diverse media and use cases, consisting of:

• Input/Preprocessing

• Watermark Creator (metadata, biometric, etc.)

• Domain-Adaptive Embedding

• Encryption & Access Control

• Evaluation & Logging

• Watermark Extraction & Tamper Alerts

This flexible system enables interoperability, reusability, and domain-specific customization, supporting convergence across healthcare, surveillance, and secure communication.

Conclusion

Digital watermarking becomes an important technology for protecting multimedia data in?various applications which require confidentiality, authenticity, and integrity. This article investigated?its application in three high-impact domains — Health Care Services, Surveillance, and Secure Communication—, each with specific technical and ethical consideration. Watermarking is used in health care to securely transmit sensitive diagnostic?images without compromising the privacy of the patient. It confers an evidence integrity in surveillance and forensics and enables the chain-of-custody verification?and tampering detection. To guarantee secure communication, watermarking strengthens the authentication feature?together with user traceability and content protection when they are inevitably exposed to cyber-attacks. In addition to providing various practical applications, this article also introduced a unifying extensible framework that can be used as a model?for the cross-domain instantiation of watermarking systems. This architecture facilitates?flexibility, scalability, regulatory-friendly\' development and promotes interoperability and cost-efficient development. The review also outlined some future directions including AI-powered watermark optimization, Blockchain-based?verification and the possibility of quantum watermarking. These technologies potentially allow watermarking systems to accomplish even more?than the watermarking literature would have anticipated – e.g., in the age of synthetic media, telemedicine, and intelligent surveillance. In summary, digital watermarking is not just one of the many specialized cryptographic tools anymore,?but has become a core basis for trust in digital world. As multimedia technologies become increasingly?converged and the potential for misuse of information is a major concern, watermarking is expected to be one of the key building blocks of a secure digital infrastructure. Further investigation, standardization and interdisciplinary innovative adaptation will be important to realize these full?potentials.

References

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Copyright

Copyright © 2025 Vinayak Raj Gupta, Tushar Basak, Angshuman Ghosh, Koushik Pal, Anurima Majumdar, Anirban Ghosal. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.