The piracy of software has long been a concern for owners and developers of software. In order to prevent software from piracy and unauthorized modification, many techniques to protect software have been developed. Software watermarking is such a technique for protecting software by embedding secret information into the software to identify its copyright owner. As a relatively new scientific area, the key concepts in software watermarking are informal; some are even confusing. There is a need

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... formalize these fundamental terms to facilitate the research in this field. In this paper, we formally define some concepts for software watermark recognition and use them to develop some software watermarking recognition algorithms for the QP software watermarking algorithm. We also design a prototype model of software watermark embedding and recognition system based on the concepts and algorithms established in this paper.