Digital watermarking has been presented as a solution for protection against illegal copying of multimedia objects and dozens algorithms have been proposed. Some problems seriously darken the future of this technology though. One of them is that the requirements, tools and methodologies to assess the current technologies are almost inexistent. The lack of benchmarking of current algorithms is blatant. This confuses rights holders as well as software and hardware manufacturers and prevents them from using the solution appropriate to their needs. Indeed basing long-lived protection schemes on badly tested watermarking technology does not make sense.

In this paper we will present the architecture of an evaluation tool being developed.