The growth of the Internet has created a new medium for data broadcast and transmission. Corporations can share anything and everything if they so desire, but they must be able to protect their data from copyright infringements and other damage. They must also be able to minimize the time/cost of transmitting data to their customers. This has led to the development of three new technologies for protection and efficient transmission of data: watermarking, steganography, and wavelet compression.

Steganography literally means "covered writing" in Greek. As applied to modern digital data, it generally involves using some bits of images to store data so that the difference between the original image and the data hidden message is imperceptible.

Watermarking is the process of embedding a digital signature in an image to protect copyright. As applied to images, this generally involves adding bits, the watermark, in a specific manner so that even under intense image processing, the watermark remains intact.

Wavelets are a recent development in the field of signal and image processing. They have proven especially effective at digital data compression.