Standard metadata embedding in a digital image

Telecommunications and digital networks development has determined a strongly diffusion of many disparate multimedia communication services. Distribution and successive fruition of digital contents surely cover the major part of these opportunities. Anyway the availability of a reliable infrastructure for managing all the issues related to the exchange of multimedia items among users through heterogeneous networks and systems is a crucial point. Such a need is also witnessed by numerous international initiatives (DCMI, MPEG-21, JPEG/JPEG2000 and so on) whose principal goal is to achieve a common agreement on Digital Items Identification and Description to allow transactions of digital objects in a standardized, secure and authorized manner. In this paper, a practical application which utilizes a specific digital watermarking technique to embed in a digital content standard metadata related to the content itself is presented.