Digital Watermarking

This paper reviews recent research on information-theoretic aspects of information hiding. Emphasis is placed on applications requiring high payload (e.g., covert communications). Information hiding may be viewed as a game between two teams (embedder/decoder vs. attacker), and optimal information-embedding and attack strategies may be developed in this context. This paper focuses on several such strategies, including a framework for developing near-optimal codes and universal decoders. The suboptimality of spread-spectrum strategies follows from the analysis. The theory is applied to image watermarking examples.