Correlation-and-bit-aware multiplicative spread spectrum embedding for data hiding

Watermarking and data hiding are important tools to protect digital multimedia contents. To reduce the interference effect of the host signal for the conventional multiplicative Spread Spectrum (MSS) embedding scheme, this paper proposes a novel correlation-and-bit-aware multiplicative Spread Spectrum (CMSS) embedding scheme. This scheme exploits the correlation between the host signal and the watermark as well as the bit message to be embedded to improve the decoding performance. Meanwhile, the proposed scheme maintains the simplicity of the decoder. The theoretical and experimental results show the superiority of the CMSS scheme over the MSS scheme. Compared with the traditional MSS scheme, the proposed CMSS scheme could significantly reduce the host effect in data hiding and improve the watermark decoding performance.