Multimedia and metadata watermarking driven by application constraints

Providing a fully functional multimedia DBMS (MMDBMS) becomes an emergency with the recent development of distributed environments. In this paper we address the impact of using watermarking techniques traditionally used to preserve the intellectual or industrial property (IIP) in MMDBMS. Through a multimedia content and metadata based representation model called M², we particularly study: 1) how to watermark all components of a multimedia description, and not only its raw data 2) how watermarking can guarantee the mapping between multimedia objects and their descriptors, avoiding accidental or malevolent mismatch inside crucial documents 3) how to preserve data significance and semantics when altering data for watermarking purposes. We illustrate our approach by providing an example in the medical domain