Digital watermarking is a key ingredient to copyright protection. It provides a solution to illegal copying of digital material and has many other useful applications such as broadcast monitoring and the recording of electronic transactions. Now, for the first time, there is a book that focuses exclusively on this exciting technology. Digital Watermarking covers the crucial research findings in the field: it explains the principles underlying digital watermarking technologies, describes the requirements that have given rise to them, and discusses the diverse ends to which these technologies are being applied. As a result, additional groundwork is laid for future developments in this field, helping the reader understand and anticipate new approaches and applications.

Digital Watermarking

One of the aims of the standardization committee has been the development of Part I, which could be used on a royalty- and fee-free basis. This is important for the standard to become widely accepted. The standardization process, which is coordinated by the JTCI/SC29/WG1 of the ISO/IEC has already produced the international standard (IS) for Part I. In this article the structure of Part I of the JPFG 2000 standard is presented and performance comparisons with established standards are reported. This article is intended to serve as a tutorial for the JPEG 2000 standard. The main application areas and their requirements are given. The architecture of the standard follows with the description of the tiling, multicomponent transformations, wavelet transforms, quantization and entropy coding. Some of the most significant features of the standard are presented, such as region-of-interest coding, scalability, visual weighting, error resilience and file format aspects. Finally, some comparative results are reported and the future parts of the standard are discussed.

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The JPEG 2000 still image compression standard

With the increasing use of multimedia technologies, image compression requires higher performance as well as new features. To address this need in the specific area of still image encoding, a new standard is currently being developed, the JPEG2000. It is not only intended to provide rate-distortion and subjective image quality performance superior to existing standards, but also to provide features and functionalities that current standards can either not address efficiently or in many cases cannot address at all. Lossless and lossy compression, embedded lossy to lossless coding, progressive transmission by pixel accuracy and by resolution, robustness to the presence of bit-errors and region-of-interest coding, are some representative features. It is interesting to note that JPEG2000 is being designed to address the requirements of a diversity of applications, e.g. Internet, color facsimile, printing, scanning, digital photography, remote sensing, mobile applications, medical imagery, digital library and E-commerce.

The JPEG2000 still image coding system: an overview

In 1996, the JPEG committee began to investigate possibilities for a new still image compression standard to serve current and future applications. This initiative, which was named JPEG 2000, has resulted in a comprehensive standard (ISO 15444∣ITU-T Recommendation T.800) that is being issued in six parts. Part 1, in the same vein as the JPEG baseline system, is aimed at minimal complexity and maximal interchange and was issued as an International Standard at the end of 2000. Parts 2–6 define extensions to both the compression technology and the file format and are currently in various stages of development. In this paper, a technical description of Part 1 of the JPEG 2000 standard is provided, and the rationale behind the selected technologies is explained. Although the JPEG 2000 standard only specifies the decoder and the codesteam syntax, the discussion will span both encoder and decoder issues to provide a better understanding of the standard in various applications.

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An overview of the JPEG 2000 still image compression standard

Embodiments are described for an adaptive audio system that processes audio data comprising a number of independent monophonic audio streams. One or more of the streams has associated with it metadata that specifies whether the stream is a channel-based or object-based stream. Channel-based streams have rendering information encoded by means of channel name; and the object-based streams have location information encoded through location expressions encoded in the associated metadata. A codec packages the independent audio streams into a single serial bitstream that contains all of the audio data. This configuration allows for the sound to be rendered according to an allocentric frame of reference, in which the rendering location of a sound is based on the characteristics of the playback environment (e.g., room size, shape, etc.) to correspond to the mixer's intent. The object position metadata contains the appropriate allocentric frame of reference information required to play the sound correctly using the available speaker positions in a room that is set up to play the adaptive audio content.

System and method for adaptive audio signal generation, coding and rendering

JPEG 2000, the new ISO/ITU-T standard for still image coding, is about to be finished. Other new standards have been recently introduced, namely JPEG-LS and MPEG-4 VTC. This paper compares the set of features offered by JPEG 2000, and how well they are fulfilled, versus JPEG-LS and MPEG-4 VTC, as well as the older but widely used JPEG and more recent PNG. The study concentrates on compression efficiency and functionality set, while addressing other aspects such as complexity. Lossless compression efficiency as well as the fixed and progressive lossy rate-distortion behaviors are evaluated. Robustness to transmission errors, Region of Interest coding and complexity are also discussed. The principles behind each algorithm are briefly described. The results show that the choice of the "best" standard depends strongly on the application at hand, but that JPEG 2000 supports the widest set of features among the evaluated standards, while providing superior rate-distortion performance in most cases.

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JPEG 2000 still image coding versus other standards

With the growing ubiquity and mobility of multimedia-enabled devices, universal multimedia access (UMA) is emerging as one of the important components for the next generation of multimedia applications. The basic concept underlying UMA is universal or seamless access to multimedia content, by automatic selection and adaptation of content based on the user's environment. UMA promises an integration of these different perspectives into a new class of content adaptive applications that could allow users to access multimedia content without concern for specific coding formats, terminal capabilities, or network conditions. We discuss methods that support UMA and the tools provided by MPEG-7 to achieve this. We also discuss the inclusion of metadata in JPEG 2000 encoded images. We present these methods in the typical order that they may be used in an actual application. Therefore, we first discuss the (personalized) selection of desired content from all available content, followed by the organization of related variations of a single piece of content. Then, we discuss segmentation and summarization of audio video (AV) content, and finally, transcoding of AV content.

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Metadata-driven multimedia access

This paper presents an approach which allows an efficient on-the-fly decoding of regions of interest of an already encoded image without need for a complete decoding/encoding process. The basic method is compatible with the wavelet based compression scheme adopted for the JPEG2000 standard and has been already adopted in a previous verification model. This technique is specially of value in interactive client/server applications linked through narrowband networks, in which the client can request the server to tailor more efficiently the transmission of the desired information at little processing cost. Simulation results show significant improvement in reduction of transmission time and enhanced flexibility at the expense of a very small complexity and bit rate overhead.

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Region of interest coding in JPEG2000 for interactive client/server applications

The invention teaches a method of positioning a first image having a first image format into a second image comprising multiple image blocks and having a second image format. A straight boundary of at least one image block in the second image is identified. The first image is positioned into the second image by aligning an edge of the first image with the identified straight boundary. Alternatively, a block row or column of the first image can be aligned with the straight boundary but then in such a way that an edge of the first image parallel to the block row or column is aligned with a boundary of a row or column of image blocks in the second image. This image positioning reduces any bleeding artifacts and the number of bits required for representing the image during encoding.

Resizing video and aligning video image edges to block boundaries and picture boundaries

In an image scaling method, an image (10) having an original row/ column resolution N0 is scaled into a scaled image (30) having a target row/ column resolution Nτ. A filter set comprising a filters is provided, where a being equal to a quotient of the target resolution N1, and a common denominator k of the original resolution N0 and the target resolution N1.. The common denominator k is a positive number larger than one. For at least one row/ column (16/ 18) of image elements (12), a filtered image element (32) of the scaled image (30) is formed, for each filter in the filter set, by filtering at least one image element (12) of the at least one row/ column (16/ 18) using the filter. This image element formation is repeated up to k times over the at least row/ column (16/ 18) to form a scaled row/ column (36/38) of image elements (32) of the scaled image (30).

Joel Askelof

Papers

JPEG 2000 still image coding versus other standards

Metadata-driven multimedia access

Region of interest coding in JPEG2000 for interactive client/server applications

Resizing video and aligning video image edges to block boundaries and picture boundaries

Image scaling method