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

With the ease of distribution of digital images, there is a growing concern for copyright control and authentication. While there are many existing watermarking and data hiding methods for natural images, almost none can be applied to halftone images. In this paper, we proposed two novel data hiding methods for halftone images. The proposed Data Hiding Pair-Toggling (DHPT) hides data by forced complementary toggling at pseudo-random locations within a halftone image. It is found to be very effective for halftone images with relatively coarse textures. For halftone images with fine textures (such as error diffusion with Steinberg kernel), the proposed Data Hiding Error Diffusion (DHED) gives significantly better visual quality by integrating the data hiding into the error diffusion operation. Both DHPT and DHED are computationally very simple and yet effective in hiding a relatively large amount of data. Both algorithms yield halftone images with good visual quality.

Data Hiding for halftone images

Improved methods, systems, and devices for Wyner-Ziv video compression are provided based on the disclosed successive resolution refinement techniques. The disclosed resolution refinement schemes improve rate-distortion performance, visual quality and decoding speed with lower complexity than conventional bitplane refinement methods. The disclosed details enable various refinements and modifications according to system design considerations.

Wyner-ziv successive refinement video compression

We propose an analytical model to estimate the synthesized view quality in 3D video. The model relates errors in the depth images to the synthesis quality, taking into account texture image characteristics, texture image quality, and the rendering process. Especially, we decompose the synthesis distortion into texture-error induced distortion and depth-error induced distortion. We analyze the depth-error induced distortion using an approach combining frequency and spatial domain techniques. Experiment results with video sequences and coding/rendering tools used in MPEG 3DV activities show that our analytical model can accurately estimate the synthesis noise power. Thus, the model can be used to estimate the rendering quality for different system designs.

An Analytical Model for Synthesis Distortion Estimation in 3D Video

JPEG2000 is the new image coding standard which can provide superior rate-distortion performance over the old JPEG standard. However, the conventional post-compression rate-distortion (PCRD) optimization scheme in JPEG2000 is not efficient. It requires entropy encoding all available data even though a large portion of them will not be included in the final output. In this paper, three rate control methods are proposed to efficiently reduce both the computational complexity and memory usage over the conventional PCRD method. The first method, called successive bit-plane rate allocation (SBRA), allocates the bit rate by using the currently available rate-distortion information only. The second method, called priority scanning rate allocation (PSRA), allocates bits according to certain prioritized ordering. The third method uses PSRA to achieve optimal truncation as PCRD without encoding of all the image details and is called priority scanning with optimal truncation (PSOT). Simulation results suggest that the three proposed methods provide different tradeoff among visual quality, computational complexity, coding delay and working memory size. SBRA is memoryless and causal and requires the least computational complexity, lowest coding delay and achieves good visual quality. PSRA achieves higher PSNR than SBRA at the expense of larger working memory size and longer coding delay. PSOT gives the best PSNR but requires even more computation, delay and memory.

Efficient rate control for JPEG2000 image coding

In this paper, we propose two novel algorithms, namely intensity selection (IS) and connection selection (CS), that can be applied to the existing halftone image data hiding algorithms DHSPT, DHPT and DHST to achieve improved visual quality. The proposed algorithms generalize the hidden data representation and select the best location out of a set of candidate locations for the application of DHSPT, DHPT or DHST. The two algorithms provide trade-off between visual quality and computational complexity. The IS yields higher visual quality but requires either the original multi-tone image or the inverse-halftoned image which implies high computation requirement. The CS has lower visual quality than IS but requires neither the original nor the inverse-halftoned images. Some objective visual quality measures are defined. Our experiments suggest that significant improvement in visual quality can be achieved, especially when the number of candidate locations is large.

/pdf/halftone-image-data-hiding-with-intensity-selection-and-3elrjnfpq9.pdf

Oscar C. Au

Papers

Data Hiding for halftone images

Wyner-ziv successive refinement video compression

An Analytical Model for Synthesis Distortion Estimation in 3D Video

Efficient rate control for JPEG2000 image coding

Halftone Image Data Hiding with Intensity Selection and Connection Selection