Digimarc Corporation has announced new track and trace and digital watermarking capabilities for digital imagery. The idea is to provide digital image and brand owners with increased visibility into authorized and unauthorized use of their digital image assets and brands.

The ImageBridge tracking system from Digimarc, now enhanced by services from BD-BrandProtect, crawls the Internet as well as specific URLs provided by customers to search more than 200 million images each month. When it locates digitally watermarked images, Digimarc delivers reports back to digital image and brand owners allowing them to track their images and more effectively track advertising for their products and/or use of their images in ads, and protect associated trademarks and copyrights.

"As the distribution of digital photography and other media content has gone non-linear, fueled by the popularity of social networking and user generated content sites, the importance and value of monitoring and measuring digital assets has increased exponentially," said Stuart Rosove, senior director of business development, Digimarc.

In addition to providing Digimarc customers with enhanced image search capabilities, the partnership enables BD-BrandProtect to market Digimarc´s digital watermarking technology to its own customer base. These Digimarc capabilities complement BD-BrandProtect´s offerings that locate and mitigate potential instances of online threats – such as phishing, fraud, copyright infringement, web traffic diversion and more.

Digital watermarking provides an identifier for all types of media content, including digital images, television, music and movies. It enables identification of media content across multiple platforms and distribution networks. For digital images, Digimarc ImageBridge digital watermarking weaves a unique and imperceptible identifier into photos as a means of communicating copyright ownership.