Facilitating Watermark Insertion by Preprocessing Media

• Main Authors: Matt L. Miller, Ingemar J. Cox
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: SpringerOpen 2004-10-01
• Series: EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing
• Subjects: digital watermarking; preprocessing; digital rights management; copy control.
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/S1110865704403072
• ISSN: 1687-6172; 1687-6180

There are several watermarking applications that require the deployment of a very large number of watermark embedders. These applications often have severe budgetary constraints that limit the computation resources that are available. Under these circumstances, only simple embedding algorithms can be deployed, which have limited performance. In order to improve performance, we propose preprocessing the original media. It is envisaged that this preprocessing occurs during content creation and has no budgetary or computational constraints. Preprocessing combined with simple embedding creates a watermarked Work, the performance of which exceeds that of simple embedding alone. However, this performance improvement is obtained without any increase in the computational complexity of the embedder. Rather, the additional computational burden is shifted to the preprocessing stage. A simple example of this procedure is described and experimental results confirm our assertions.