Abstract
The explosion in the online propagation of digital multimedia suggests that such data is vulnerable to threats, data-manipulation and attack. This problem is further exacerbated when dealing with highly sensitive digital multimedia content such as the Holy Quran, in which the modification/corruption of a single character, diacritic or symbol would regard the entire content as invalid. Hence, the protection of sensitive data and Quran multimedia data in particular is essential to ensure that only the original non-tampered data is propagated with no distortion. Protection schemes include verifying integrity, proof-of-authenticity, tamper-detection and copyright protection. A technique in the literature used to provide the necessary security for such digital content is known as digital watermarking. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art in digital text, image and audio watermarking applicable to sensitive digital content and discusses how those approaches can achieve the required protection, measured against relevant performance metrics and set according to their respective environments and digital formats being used. The main goal of this paper is to provide an effective study by which to develop new techniques and approaches for the protection of sensitive multimedia content.