Digital Watermarking

My thesis project is a study of digital watermarking technologies for multimedia data.  Watermarking is the process of secretly embedding sideband data within a host signal.  There are many applications of watermarking, but most notable is the ability to add copyright labels or author information to digital works.  This is particularly important for information distributed across the Internet, for it is much easier to copy, manipulate, and redistribute digital content while retaining the "quality" of the works.   The inability to protect against copyright violations is one major reason why magazine and other media publishers have been reluctant to provide their services online.   A current example of this problem is the controversy regarding piracy of CD-quality music across the Internet in MPEG Layer III (MP3) format.

My study is focused on watermarking technologies for wideband audio (i.e., 44.1 kHz sampling rate, linearly quantized to 16 bits per pixel), greyscale still images, and greyscale digital video sequences.