Achievable performance of digital watermarking systems

Abstract
A variety of digital watermarking applications have emerged recently that require the design of systems for embedding one signal (the ``embedded signal'' or ``watermark'') within another signal (the ``host signal''). We develop a framework for analyzing achievable performance trade-offs of these systems among robustness, distortion, and embedding rate. We also describe a recently introduced class of embedding methods, quantization index modulation (QIM), in which an ensemble of quantizers is constructed and information is embedded by quantizing the host signal with a quantizer associated with the watermark. We introduce an implementation of such a method called spread-transform dither modulation where the embedded information modulates the dither signal of a dithered quantizer, which quantizes projections of the host signal onto a spreading vector. We show that QIM systems have considerable performance advantages over previously proposed spread-spectrum and low-bit modulation systems.

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