Guest Editorial: Advanced information hiding techniques for industrial applications

Due to the remarkable development of the Internet, users are now allowed easy storage, duplication, and distribution of digital data/contents for many applications. This has become a great concern to the digital data publishing industries, because technologies or techniques that could be used to protect intellectual property rights for digital media, and prevent unauthorized copying did not exist. Further, brand-name products and other problems concerning the manufacture of counterfeit goods, as well as the identity theft, copyright violation, and ownership identification, has been the subject of extensive news coverage. To ensure the solid growth of the promising digital content industry, content protection technology is necessary, which will be the used as the mechanism to protect copyright holders and their content. Information hiding techniques are used to provide copyright protection, content authentication and verify ownership of media/entities. The guest editorial team (Amit Kumar Singh, Stefano Berretti and Huimin LU) hopes that the articles included in this Special Issue contribute to the state-of-the-art solutions of the information hiding techniques for industrial as well as real-world applications. Our Call for Papers received an enthusiastic response with 48 high-quality submissions in this particular section. After a rigorous review process, we accepted 16 articles to form the Special Section. The first nine articles cover several core issues related to security, and the next seven articles showcase multiple applications for which information processing are important. A brief summary of each paper is introduced below.