Maximizing efficacy for efficient watermarking systems

Digital watermarking is an emerging technique to protect intellectual property right and to transmit secondary data. This paper investigates efficient designs of watermarking system that maximizes the error exponents of probability of detection errors. It turns out that the efficacy of the systems can be maximized in doing so. We take a detector-centric approach to achieving our designing goals. First an optimum detector is constricted by taking into account the real statistical characteristics of the multimedia host data. Then, for an encoder with side information of the decoder as well as the host signal, a particular watermark pattern can be constructed to satisfy some desired properties, such as automatic adaptivity to the local content of the host signal, and/or host-interference rejection. A family of automatically host-content adaptive watermarks (AHCAW) is also proposed. The method paves the way towards creating efficient watermarks and building new watermarking systems.