B O O K R E V I E W S
played and tabulating royalties due; owner commercial experience associated with
Digital Watermarking
I. Cox, M. Miller, and J. Bloom. 576 pp.
ISBN 1-55860-714-5. Morgan Kaufmann
Publishers 共2001兲, $69.95 hardbound.
Reviewed by Chris Honsinger, Eastman
Kodak Research Labs, Rochester, NY.
Digital watermarking technology has
loudly proclaimed its arrival over the past
several years. It is difficult to find any jour-
nal associated with signals, imaging,
sound, or video that doesn’t have a handful
of digital watermarking related articles.
Having worked in this field for several
years now, I know that there is still quite a
bit of confusion among users and policy
makers about what this technology can and
can’t do. Because the field is rather new,
confusion is present even among the re-
searchers. Signs of this confusion are mul-
tiple meanings for technical terms and
rampant re-invention of basic algorithms.
In my opinion, Digital Watermarking is
the first book to succeed in bringing order
to this unsettled technology field. In gen-
eral, the book presents a cohesive structure
to the vocabulary, conventions, and tax-
onomy of the component technologies in-
volved in this field. It should be useful to
upper level undergraduates with some
background in signal processing or com-
munication theory, graduate students, and
seasoned researchers in the field. Often the
authors present concepts from multiple
points of view, making the concepts acces-
sible to professionals and students from
differing disciplines. Many concrete ex-
amples with ample discussions are pro-
vided along with a source code support li-
brary. Because the authors have succeeded
on pedagogical, theoretical, and practical
grounds, the book will likely be the stan-
dard textbook on this subject for quite
some time.
The first section in the book provides a
historical perspective and motivates a
number of useful applications of the tech-
nology. The authors conclude this discus-
sion with a clarification of the use of digi-
tal watermarking vis-à-vis cryptography.
Chapter 2 delves deeper into the applica-
tions that can be addressed by digital wa-
termarking and provides criteria for evalu-
ating a given watermarking system for
various applications. Among the applica-
tions described are: broadcast monitoring,
e.g., monitoring radio stations for songs
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identification, e.g., finding the owner of a
professional photograph to obtain a li-
cense; proof of ownership; content authen-
tication, e.g., ensuring that a transmitted
digital x-ray has not been tampered with;
and copy control, e.g., stopping a copier
when detecting copyrighted material.
Chapter 3 focuses on the basics of em-
bedding and extracting watermarks prima-
rily from the point of view of elementary
communications theory. This is comple-
mented by an interpretation of digital wa-
termarking that is based in geometry, e.g.,
correlation is modeled as a dot product of
two vectors. This may prove helpful for
students without a background in signal
processing or communications concepts.
The chapter concludes by defining the
various ways to measure correlation.
While Chap. 3 somewhat generally con-
siders the combination of watermarks with
images or sound, Chap. 4 presents ways of
mapping data into watermarks. The au-
thors again motivate concepts from mul-
tiple points of view. Consequently, the
reader should gain a good deal of intuition
for understanding the tradeoffs associated
with the amount of data embedded and
digital watermarking systems design.
Some consideration is also given to error
detection and correction algorithms, an
area that deserves special consideration in
digital watermarking.
Chapter 5 introduces the idea of in-
formed embedding and informed coding.
The term informed implies that the media,
e.g., images or sound, are known at the
time of embedding. A counter-intuitive re-
sult from information theory suggests that
data can be embedded with media in such
a way that the extraction is unencumbered
by the media itself so long as the media is
known at the time of embedding 共and cer-
tain other assumptions兲. Even though the
assumptions are rarely, if ever, met, the
concepts involved can be used to improve
the data capacity of a digital watermarking
system. This chapter explores specific
ways of doing this.
Chapter 6 provides an excellent ground-
ing in calculating error rates and false
positive rates. For a digital watermarking
system to be accepted as a means for evi-
dence in the courts, a thorough character-
ization of the algorithm’s performance in
the context of these ideas is required. Here,
it is apparent that the authors bring their
their roles in the ‘‘Galaxy’’ DVD water-
marking proposal supported by Hitachi,
IBM, NEC, Pioneer and Sony.
Chapter 7 motivates the usage of percep-
tual models in digital watermarking. Most
readers of this journal are likely intimately
familiar with the perception-oriented con-
cepts presented here. However, when the
perceptual model affects the performance
of the extraction, thus forming tradeoffs,
we are likely to be less familiar with the
issues. The value of this chapter lies less in
its disclosure of the perceptual models but
more in the treatment of the interaction of
the extraction process with perceptual
models.
Chapter 8 provides an overview of the
elements of robust watermarking systems.
A robust image watermarking system can
survive ‘‘attacks’’ such as lossy compres-
sion, cropping, rotation, scale, printing,
scanning, etc. This chapter provides a rea-
sonably complete overview of the tech-
niques used to maintain the integrity of the
watermark data in the face of these kinds
of attacks.
Chapter 9 explores another question that
plays in both robust and fragile watermark-
ing systems. That is, what is the water-
marking systems’ ability to survive pur-
poseful attacks. In addition to discussing
this topic from a general point of view, the
authors explicitly describe seven known
attacks in detail.
The last chapter considers the topic of
content authentication. Content authentica-
tion is becoming increasingly relevant to
managing medical records, insurance com-
panies, forensic scientists, and military
communications. The authors discuss how
digital-watermarking algorithms can deter-
mine local or global media alterations,
whether the alteration is significant or in-
significant, and under what conditions a
digital watermark can be completely re-
moved, restoring the media to its original,
unaltered state.
In summary, this book contains a thor-
ough treatment of digital watermarking
theory and practice. As a further measure
of completeness, the authors have lucidly
distilled key theoretical results into an ap-
pendix. For those not schooled in informa-
tion theory or cryptography, a short primer
is also included. Finally, the comprehen-
sive reference section alone is worth the
price of the book.