LAUSR

Recently, multimedia stands as one of the most demanding and exciting aspects of the information era and every moments several multimedia information are created and transmitted all around the world through different unsecured networks (Singh et al. 2017). Digital document distribution over open channel using information and communication technology (ICT) has proved an indispensible and cost effective technique for dissemination and distribution of digital media files (Singh et al. 2017; Agrawal et al. 2019; Podilchuk and Delp 2001). However, prevention of copyright violation, ownership identification, and identity theft have been challenging issues due to attempts of malicious attacks/ hacking of open channel information (Singh et al. 2017). The prime motive behind attacks can be to alter, modify, or even delete the document watermark to illegally claim ownership or preventing the information transfer to intended recipients. Therefore, addressing these challenges has been an interesting problem for researchers in the field. One such effort that has been attracting interest is based on multimedia data hiding, which is a technique to hide multimedia data into a cover message without creating any perceptual distortion of the cover for identification, annotation and copyright (Singh et al. 2018; Mohanty et al. 2017). In recent years, multimedia data hiding techniques develops very fast and applies to many applications, such as E-health, military, communication, privacy protection, identification, media file archiving, broadcast monitoring, hardware and chip level security, remote education and insurance companies, secured E-voting systems, fingerprinting, real time audio/video, robotics, rightful ownership of identity card and digital cinema (Singh et al. 2017; Mohanty et al. 2017). Our Call for Papers received an enthusiastic response with 31 high-quality submissions. Per the journal policy, it was ensured that handling editors did not have any potential conflict of interest with authors of submitted articles. All articles were reviewed by at least two independent potential referees. The articles were evaluated for their rigor and quality, and also for their relevance to the theme of our Special Issue. After a rigorous review process, we accepted 11 articles to form the Special Issue. The brief summary about each paper is presented as follows.