Marten van Dijk
Consultant, Inventor, Researcher, Applied Mathematician, & Computer Scientist
Information Embedding and Watermarking:
Multi-media networks and optical storage media facilitate the distribution of content, but at the same
time make copying and copyright piracy simple. In the digital domain perfect copies can be made, without
the deterioration of quality and noise accumulation that we are used to with analog systems. For digital
multimedia assets, there is a need to embed copyright data, such as the ownership or the identity of the
authorized user in an indelible way. Some digital image representation formats already include specific
fields to write copyright data, but such fields can easily be modified or erased by a malicious user. A
more robust method is to embed the data in the content itself such that attacks to remove the data imply
that the content is affected as well. Such embedded data is often referred to as an electronic watermark.
In some applications of electronic watermarks, the device that detects whether content contains a watermark
or not is in the public domain. Attackers can misuse such a detector as an oracle that reveals up to one
bit of information about the watermark in each experiment [1,2,3]. Therefore we define the workload as the
number of times the detector needs to be used in order to remove the watermark. For watermarked images we
proposed a countermeasure increasing the workload by orders of magnitude. However, the workload does
remain linear in the number of pixels.
We also studied the general problem of information embedding from a rate-distortion point of view. We
proposed embedding codes based on perfect error-correcting codes [4,5,6,7].
Techniques for digital rights management for optical storage are presented in [8,9].
[1] J.P. Linnartz and M. van Dijk, Analysis of the sensitivity attack against electronic watermarks in images,
Proceeding of the Workshop on Information Hiding, Portland, 15-17 April 1998, LNCS 1525, Springer-Verlag,
258-272, 1998.
[2] T. Kalker, J.P. Linnartz, and M. van Dijk, Watermark estimation through detector analysis,
Proc. of the ICIP, Volume I, Chicago, October 4-7, 425-429, 1998.
[3] J.P.M.G. Linnartz, M.J.J.J.-B. Maes, A.A.C.M. Kalker, G.F.G. Depovere, P.M.J. Rongen, C.W.F. Vriens,
and M.E. van Dijk, Device for optically scanning a record carrier, US 6415040, 2002.
[4] F.M.J. Willems and M. van Dijk, Capacity and codes for embedding information in grayscale signals,
IEEE Trans. on Inform. Theory 51(3), p. 1209-1214, 2005.
[5] M. van Dijk and F.M.J. Willems, Embedding information in gray-scale images,
Proc. 22nd Symp. on Information Theory in the Benelux, 147-154, 2001.
[6] F.M.J. Willems and M. van Dijk, Codes for embedding information in gray-scale signals,
cdrom Proceedings 39th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control and Computing, Allerton
House, Monticello, IL, USA, October 3-5, 2001, SPS-30 [06.11], 2001.
[7] M.E. van Dijk and F.M.J. Willems, Embedding auxiliary data in an information signal, US 7392453, 2008.
[8] M.E. van Dijk, Method for encoding a stream of bits of a binary source signal into a stream of bits of a
binary channel signal, US 2001/0026594, 2001.
[9] J.C. Talstra, M.J.J.J-B. Maes, H.D.L. Hollmann, and M.E. van Dijk, Copy protection system,
US 2002/0026587, 2002.
© 2009 Marten van Dijk .
All rights reserved.