Digital Watermarking: A Game Between Embedder and Attacker

In watermarking applications, the embedder tries to communicate as much watermark information as possible while maintaining a sufficiently high host signal quality. In contrast, an attacker tries to hinder watermark communication while impairing the host signal quality as little as possible. The attacker might apply more severe attacks than simple AWGN as considered so far. The solution of the game between the watermark embedder and attacker for attacks being constrained to additive noise and linear filtering is analyzed. The presented analysis provides upper bounds on the achievable performance of blind watermarking schemes for general embedding schemes, and tighter upper bounds for specific embedding schemes like SCS or SS.