When the ?rst watermarking papers appeared in mid 90ies, the industrial needs on copyright protection and rights management of digital media were already pressing. The music industry was already loosing large revenues due to music piracy. Watermarking was proposed as a very promising solution to combat digital piracy and illegal digital media copying. Most of the p- posed techniques have been based on solid theoretical background and, thus, attracted a large interest in the scienti?c community. The ensuing explosive growth produced rich literature, signi?cant theoretical results and IPR p- tection solutions. Besides watermarking, which is an active technique, in the sense that a watermarkmustbeembeddedinthemultimediasignal,passivetechniquesfor IPRprotectionandDRMemergedrecently.Suchtechniques(calledsometimes ?ngerprinting or replica detection or perceptual hashing) are essentially fast retrieval/hashingtechniquesforbroadcast/internettra?cmonitoringthrough replica searches in copyright holder or trusted third parties databases. Watermarking is proven to be a very good solution for intellectual pr- erty rights protection, particularly for digital images. It has also been s- cessfully used for still image content authentication. Its use for video, audio and music IPR protection was less widespread, since the related technical and business model problems were proven to be more di?cult to tackle. Fing- printing/replica detection is still at its development phase and has found so far signi?cant use in music copy detection. However, there are no solutions that are yet universally acceptable.
This book presents the latest research in the area of multimedia data hiding paradigms. The book is divided into four parts and an appendix.
- The first part introduces multimedia signal processing and information hiding techniques. It includes multimedia representation, need for multimedia, digital watermarking fundamentals and requirements of watermarking.
- The second part describes the recent advances in multimedia signal processing.
- The third part presents information hiding techniques including steganography, secret sharing and watermarking.
- The final part of this book includes practical applications of intelligent multimedia signal processing and data hiding systems.
- Appendix includes source codes and/or executables related to the topics in some chapters. Interested readers are invited to use these programs.
This book will be valuable to both academia and industry. This book is directed to the final year undergraduate and junior postgraduate students. Researchers and professors in the departments of electrical/electronics/communication engineering, computer science, and relating departments will find this book useful.
