JSE_V10_N4_RevP1 E. Sabarinathan E. Manoj Journal on Software Engineering 2230–7168 10 4 13 29 Watermarking, Information Hiding, Steganography, Cryptography The Development of multimedia applications makes digital media to bring about conveniences to the people by easy processing of data. At the same time, it enables the illegal attackers to attack the works. For the protection of data, there has been growing interest in developing effective techniques to discourage the unauthorized duplication of digital data. Among Cryptography and Steganography, only the watermarking provides the copyright protection and authentication. This paper is a comprehensive review of diverse image processing methods and enormous number of interrelated solicitations in various disciplines, including various watermarking techniques. In this paper, different existing techniques are discussed along with their drawbacks, also explaining their future scope. April - June 2016 Copyright © 2016 i-manager publications. All rights reserved. i-manager Publications http://www.imanagerpublications.com/Article.aspx?ArticleId=6058