Robustness-Conserved Partially Host-Adaptive Watermarking Using a Baseband-Spread Spectrum Coding Technique

In order to reduce the impact of watermark embedding on the perceptual fidelity of the marked signal, watermarking systems process the generated watermark to match it to the local properties of the underlying host signal prior to embedding. However, this adaptation process could distort the watermark, affecting its robustness and information content. In this paper, a new watermark coding technique is proposed, that enables the application of some mark-nondistorting host-adaptation processing, where the intensity of the watermark could be redistributed according to the local properties of the underlying host without inducing any distortion into the watermark to be embedded. This completely eliminates the need to equalize adaptation distortions prior to decoding, and hence, to pass any side information about the adaptation processing to the decoder, too.