计算机网络技术的飞速发展与信息媒体的数字化 ;使得在网络环境中对数字产品实施有效的内容保护成为一个迫在眉睫的现实问题.传统的数字签名技术只是用于对通信领域的信息传送进行篡改检测 ;而脆弱性数字水印技术则为网络环境下多媒体的内容保护提供了一个有效的解决方案.与鲁棒性水印不同的是 ;脆弱性水印主要用于检测发生在多媒体数据中的篡改 ;并对其定位.为了推动我国在此前沿领域研究工作的进一步深入 ;这里就当前脆弱性数字图象图象水印技术的基本特征、一般原理、研究现状、攻击方法及发展方向进行一个综述.

Effective multimedia authentication is an increasing important issue in a networked environment. Fragile digital watermark thus come into being. Unlike traditional digital signature which is bounded with the content, fragile watermarking works effectively for multimedia content authentication by embedding a watermark(such as identification data, serials number, text or image etc.) to multimedia documents without influencing the vision or hearing effect of multimedia. Fragile digital watermarking is of great importance in courtroom defence, reliable e-business, medical image databases, etc. When the conetent of multimedia is suspected, the extraction of fragile watermark can be used to detect and localize tampers, even present the category of tampering. To motivate the relative research in this field, we attempt to give a brief overview of fragile digital watermarking into the context of image authentication in this paper.The basic characteristics of fragile watermarking is first outlined.Then comes the discussion of current algorithms, which not only includes basic schemes--spatial domain based algorithms and transform domain based methods, but also sums up the four typical types of fragile watermarking with different applications. Possible attacks and future research topics come in the following and future direction is outlined in the end.There still need a long way for fragile digital watermarking to go into standilization and actual applications.