There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

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

Digital audio, video, images, and documents are flying through cyberspace to their respective owners. Unfortunately, along the way, individuals may choose to intervene and take this content for themselves. Digital watermarking and steganography technology greatly reduces the instances of this by limiting or eliminating the ability of third parties to decipher the content that he has taken. The many techiniques of digital watermarking (embedding a code) and steganography (hiding information) continue to evolve as applications that necessitate them do the same. The authors of this second edition provide an update on the framework for applying these techniques that they provided researchers and professionals in the first well-received edition. Steganography and steganalysis (the art of detecting hidden information) have been added to a robust treatment of digital watermarking, as many in each field research and deal with the other. New material includes watermarking with side information, QIM, and dirty-paper codes. The revision and inclusion of new material by these influential authors has created a must-own book for anyone in this profession.

*This new edition now contains essential information on steganalysis and steganography
*New concepts and new applications including QIM introduced
*Digital watermark embedding is given a complete update with new processes and applications

Digital Watermarking and Steganography

Matrix Differential Calculus with Applications in Statistics and Econometrics

Review: Digital image steganography: Survey and analysis of current methods

We propose methods for generating a halftone image, in which each pixel takes one of two tone values. The generated image contains hidden data, which is present at data storage pixels chosen using a pseudo-random number generator. In a first case, the data is hidden within an existing halftone image by reversing the tone value at certain of the data storage pixels, and at pixels neighbouring the data storage pixels. In a second case, the halftone image is generated from a grey-scale image, and data is hidden during this conversion process.

/pdf/methods-and-apparatus-for-hiding-data-in-halftone-images-50hnwxkc3t.pdf

Methods and apparatus for hiding data in halftone images

In this paper we propose an edge-directed error concealment (EDEC) algorithm, to recover lost slices in video sequences encoded by flexible macroblock ordering. First, the strong edges in a corrupted frame are estimated based on the edges in the neighboring frames and the received area of the current frame. Next, the lost regions along these estimated edges are recovered using both spatial and temporal neighboring pixels. Finally, the remaining parts of the lost regions are estimated. Simulation results show that compared to the existing boundary matching algorithm [1] and the exemplar-based inpainting approach [2] , the proposed EDEC algorithm can reconstruct the corrupted frame with both a better visual quality and a higher decoder peak signal-to-noise ratio.

/pdf/edge-directed-error-concealment-39wfet18au.pdf

Edge-Directed Error Concealment

There is growing interest in hiding data for authentication and copyright control in halftone images printed in books, newspapers and by computer printers. A previous data hiding method, the data hiding by pair-toggling (DHPT), is reasonably good but introduce considerable visual artifacts. In this paper, we analyze the sources of the artifacts in DHPT and propose an improvement by using smart pair toggling. Simulation results suggest that the proposed data hiding by smart pair-toggling (DHSPT) algorithm can hide the same amount of data while generating halftone images with considerably better visual quality than DHPT.

Data hiding by smart pair toggling for halftone images

A device or method for video compression uses a technique in which changes in the image are encoded by motions of block of the image and signals indicating evolutions in the block. To determine the motions of the blocks of a each frame, a search is performed for a similar block of a previous frame based on points of the previous frame which are arranged in successive diamond shaped zones. The diamond shaped zones may be centred on the position of the block in previous frame, or one or more predicted motions of the block. The method terminates according to criteria defined using thresholds.

Device, method and digital video encoder for block-matching motion estimation

Zonal based motion estimation algorithms have been gaining in popularity in video coding. This is due to their superior performance and reduced complexity versus other conventional algorithms. In this paper we propose a further improvement on these algorithms named the Advanced Predictive Diamond Zonal Search (APDZS). The proposed algorithm introduces the concepts of multiple initial predictor candidates and adaptive thresholding, and manages to significantly improve the reliability and performance of the estimation. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the performance of this algorithm is equivalent in terms of PSNR, to that of the brute force full search algorithm even for the most complicated sequences, with almost negligible complexity.

Oscar C. Au

Papers

Methods and apparatus for hiding data in halftone images

Edge-Directed Error Concealment

Data hiding by smart pair toggling for halftone images

Device, method and digital video encoder for block-matching motion estimation

New results on zonal based motion estimation algorithms-advanced predictive diamond zonal search