随着因特网的日益普及，多媒体信息交流达到了前所未有的深度和广度，但作品侵权也随之更加容易，篡改也更加方便，因此，如何保护作品版权已受到人们的高度重视，而如今信息隐藏技术，特别是数字水印技术作为版权保护的重要手段，已得到广泛的研究和应用，为了使人们对该技术有一个较全面的了解，因而对数字水印技术的研究与进展情况进行了较系统的论述，即首先对信息隐藏技术进行了介绍，并对该技术进行了分类，然后重点分析了数字水印技术的模型、典型算法及其攻击方法，最后对数字水印技术的研究发展及其应用前景指出了一些可能的方向。

The digital media, including text, image, graphics, audio and video etc., has become a main way for information communication along with the popularization of Internet and the development of multimedia techniques. People can get almost information through the Internet. But this gives rise to serious problems including wide spread copyright violation, illegal copying, easy forging etc. How to provide copyright protection and implement covert communication has drawn extensive attention in recent years. As a main method for covert communication and copyright protection(watermarking), information hiding has been widely studied and applied. In this paper, we make an introductory review on the information hiding techniques including the last achievement in this field. First, we give the general concepts and fundamental principles of information hiding such as the definition, characteristics, classification and general framework. Then, we analyze the processing model, the typical methods, the main application and the attack analysis of watermarking. Finally, we make a discussion on some open problems and point out possible directions for further research.