| The growth of the Internet has fueled the demand for enhanced watermarking and data hiding technologies and has stimulated research into new ways to implement watermarking systems in the real world. Watermarking Systems Engineering: Enabling Digital Assets Security and Other Applications presents the principles of watermarking system design and discusses technologies in information concealment and recovery. It highlights the requirements and challenges of applications in security, image/video indexing, hidden communications, image captioning, and transmission error recovery and concealment. It explains digital watermarking technologies, and offers an understanding of new approaches and applications, laying the groundwork for developments in the field.
This book is organized as follows. After a brief introductory chapter, chapter 2 describes the main scenarios concerning data hiding technology, including IPR (Intellectually Property Rights) protection, authentication, enhanced multimedia transmission, and annotation. Though the above list of applications is by no means an exhaustive one, it serves the purpose of illustrating the potentialities of data hiding in different contexts, highlighting the different requirements and challenges set by different applications. Chapter 3 deals with information coding, describing how the to-be-hidden information is formatted prior to its insertion within the host signal. The actual embedding of the information is discussed in chapter 4. The problem of the choice of a proper set of features to host the watermark is first addressed. Then the embedding rule used to tie the watermark to them is considered by paying great attention to distinguish between blind and informed embedding schemes. The role played by human perception in the design of an effective data hiding system is discussed in chapter 5. After a brief description of the Human Visual System (HVS) and the Human Auditory System (HAS), the exploitation of the characteristics of such systems to effectively conceal the to-be-hidden information is considered for each type of media.
The book ends with a rather theoretical chapter (chapter 9), where the characteristics of a watermarking system are analyzed at a very general level, by framing watermarking in an information-theoretic/game-theory context. Though the assumptions underlying the theoretical analysis deviate, sometimes significantly, from those encountered in practical applications, the analysis given in this last chapter is extremely insightful, since it provides some hints on the ultimate limits reachable by any watermarking system. Additionally, it opens the way to a new important class of algorithms that may significantly outperform classical ones as long as the operating conditions resemble those hypothesized in the theoretical framework. |
