Watermark design pattern for intellectual property protection in electronic commerce applications

We propose watermark design patterns to model the characteristics of digital watermarks in electronic commerce applications. A watermark design pattern preserves the properties of a digital watermark in a binary tree representation. Applying the survey results and characteristics of existing watermarking techniques, watermark design patterns for four media (data-video, image, audio, and text), are derived and expressed as WDP_video, WDP_image, WDP_audio and WDP_text respectively. Our results show that watermarks for video and audio data have to be invisible and robust, and watermarks for text data has to be invisible and fragile, while watermark for image has to be either visible and fragile, or invisible and robust for electronic commerce applications. The watermark design pattern is further used to relate electronic commerce applications and digital watermarking techniques. This facilitates electronic commerce application developers to select adequate digital watermarking techniques and off-the-shelf systems for their development.