Keynote speaker III: Information embedding: From theory to practice

Watermarking, fingerprinting, and steganography applications require the secure embedding of information bits into a cover signal (such as audio, video, still images, etc.) This talk will present the fundamental concepts and outline practical approaches to such problems. First an overview of applications is given, ranging from Digital rights management to content authentication, transaction tracking, and database annotation. Then the fundamental notions pertaining to information embedding into cover signals are presented, namely signal fidelity, robustness against an adversary, and payload. An information-theoretic model is presented for a generic data hiding problem. Analysis of this model yields the notion of data-hiding capacity and sheds light into what is the structure of good data-hiding codes. Spread-spectrum and binning codes are discussed in this context. The final part of the talk shows an application of the theory to a problem of hiding data in an image.