Digital watermarking has many applications, including steganography, data authentication, and digital rights management. It is a challenging problem, since the techniques used are dependent on the type of media being watermarked, and the many competing concerns, such as not significantly degrading the quality of the original document, tamper resistance, and accuracy of detecting the presence of the watermark.

This book introduces many watermarking techniques, applied to a wide range of media, and discusses the tradeoffs between different techniques. Each chapter presents the techniques that are used in a certain type of media (such as audio, images, video, text, database, and so on). Most chapters begin with a discussion of the media type, focusing on aspects of the media type that can affect watermarking. For example, the chapter on video explains the different frame types used in mpeg video. Then, various watermarking techniques for the media type are discussed, with a few paragraphs devoted to each technique. Attacks on the techniques are then presented, and then in most chapters, a discussion focusing on a comparison of the techniques concludes.

This book unfortunately has some notable flaws, including some noticeable grammatical problems, especially in the introduction, that at times distract the reader from the point of the text. While there are enough of these issues to be distracting, the book is still very readable.

Because the book does not provide much detail on each technique, it is questionable whether someone well versed in the field would gain much from the book. However, it will serve as a great introductory resource for anyone (both researchers and practitioners) who is a beginner in this field and wants to familiarize themselves with the available techniques. Each chapter has an extensive references section that can then be used as a guide for more in-depth study.