Information Hiding and Multimedia Signal Processing

Accessing various multimedia contents is something very essential in our daily life. However, delivery of multimedia contents consumes lots of network bandwidths. Therefore, compression of multimedia is very essential, and also an inevitable task for real applications. Moreover, due to the noise induced during the transmission of data, reliable transmission of compressed multimedia is also an important issue in both academic research and real applications. In addition, with the vast amount of multimedia data, how to efficiently and effectively retrieve the necessary data is a challenging task. Also, due to the ease of delivering files over the Internet, copyright protection of the above-mentioned multimedia data seems indispensable. Briefly speaking, topics in information hiding and multimedia signal processing are popular among academia, which is also much required for industrial applications. Despite the advances made, progress across the board has been moderate. gathered individual researchers who are also the world's most respected authorities on both the fields of information hiding and multimedia signal processing. This special issue comprising of fourteen papers is focused on the various aspects in both multimedia signal processing and information hiding research domains. Papers were carefully selected to meet the state-of-the-art trends. The papers are organized as follows. First category comprises of 5 papers with topics related to information hiding and digital watermarking. In the first paper, Chang et al. [1] present the reversible data embedding scheme suitable for color images. The purpose of reversible data hiding is to perfectly recover both the original and the embedded data. The authors broaden the use of reversible data embedding from grey-level images to color images. Next, Yoshioka et al. [2] demonstrate the information hiding scheme on lossless data compression. They make use of the properties of lossless data hiding techniques, such as ZIP, to incorporate with the data embedding algorithm proposed. In the third paper, Tsai et al. [3] propose a strategy for opposing DC components watermarking. The authors in this paper show some effective schemes to counteract the watermarking attacks. In the fourth paper, Atomori et al. [4] introduce the robust video watermarking algorithm based on dual-plane correlation for immunity to rotation, scale, translation (RST), and random distortion. RST attacks are commonly encountered in real applications. The authors depict the fundamental concepts, and propose their algorithm with promising results. In the fifth paper, Han et al. [5] focus on an adaptive non-uniform quantization (ANUQ) algorithm that is suitable for …