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2002 | Book

Informed Watermarking

Authors: Joachim Eggers, Bernd Girod

Publisher: Springer US

Book Series : The International Series in Engineering and Computer Science

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About this book

This book deals with digital watermarking, which is defined by the authors of this book as the art of hiding auxiliary information in digital data in a secure, robust and imperceptible fashion. Digital watermarking as a topic has a long history, but before 1995 publications in scientific literature were almost absent. From 1995 onwards however the number of publications on watermarking has been steadily increasing. Today a number of workshops and conferences on this topic exist; also a number of scientific journals on watermarking have been published. This renewed scientific interest in digital watermarking has led very quickly to industrial interest, as well. In 1996 the Copy Protection Technical Working Group, a voluntary consortium consisting of the movie industry, the IT industry and the consumer electronics industry, issued a call for watermarking technologies for the purpose of copy protection of DVD-Video. A few years later the Secure Digital Music Initiative issued a similar call, in this case focusing on copy protection of digital music. These two efforts have been only partially successful: copy protection based on digital watermarking is not (yet) implemented on a large scale in any type of consumer device. This current "failure" of watermarking, to live up to its expectations, finds its cause in a large number of reasons, ranging from legal considerations and system aspects to the relative immaturity of watermarking as a technology.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter
Chapter 1. Introduction
Abstract
Digital media has replaced analog media in many applications within the last decade. The success of digital media over analog media is mainly due to properties like simple noise-free transmission over general-purpose channels, compact storage, perfect copying, and simple editing. Further, the availability of the Internet as an open global network for the transmission of digital data accelerated the use of digital media.
Joachim Eggers, Bernd Girod
Chapter 2. General Concepts and State-of-the-Art
Abstract
Digital watermarking is a multidisciplinary research area including disciplines like communications, signal processing, source coding, information theory, cryptography, and computer science. The variety of contributions from these different fields and the plurality of applications with similiar but not necessarily identical requirements easily confuses novices in digital watermarking. Therefore, the point of view taken in this book is clarified in this chapter. Models for digital watermarking at different levels of abstraction are introduced to obtain well-defined technical problems. Due to the diversity of the aspects involved in digital watermarking, an exhaustive discussion of the state-of-the art of the entire research of digital watermarking is beyond the scope of this book. However, an overview and brief description of previous fundamental work on digital watermarking and recent results is given as far as necessary.
Joachim Eggers, Bernd Girod
Chapter 3. Information Embedding Into IID Signals Facing an AWGN Attack
Abstract
In this chapter, information embedding into independent identically distributed (IID) data and attacks by additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) as shown in Fig. 2.4 is considered. For Gaussian data, Costa’s scheme achieves the capacity of this communication scenario. However, Costa’s scheme is not practical. Thus, a suboptimal practical communication scheme based on Costa’s idea is proposed. Its performance and properties are analyzed, and comparisons to other suboptimal implementations of Costa’s scheme are given.
Joachim Eggers, Bernd Girod
Chapter 4. Digital Watermarking: A Game Between Embedder and Attacker
Abstract
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.
Joachim Eggers, Bernd Girod
Chapter 5. Applications
Abstract
SCS is a general purpose information embedding technique which is useful in many different watermarking applications. In this chapter, some example applications are presented. First, watermarking of chemical structure sets is investigated. It turns out that for this data type synchronization of the watermark decoder can be achieved relative easily. Therefore, a a complete watermarking system can be described. Next, experimental image watermarking schemes are discussed. The robustness of ST-SCS watermarks embedded in the block-DCT domain against optimized linear filtering attacks and image compression is investigated. Finally, the usefullness of SCS watermarking for integrity-verification of image data is demonstrated.
Joachim Eggers, Bernd Girod
Chapter 6. Summary, Conclusions, and Outlook
Abstract
The ease of perfect copying, distribution, and manipulation of digital data has become a significant problem for copyright protection and integrity verification of digitized multimedia content. Digital watermarking has been proposed as one possible method to combat these problems. Thus, information embedding and digital watermarking has gained a lot of attention during the last years.
Joachim Eggers, Bernd Girod
Backmatter
Metadata
Title
Informed Watermarking
Authors
Joachim Eggers
Bernd Girod
Copyright Year
2002
Publisher
Springer US
Electronic ISBN
978-1-4615-0951-6
Print ISBN
978-1-4613-5320-1
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-0951-6