Diversity and attack characterization for improved robust watermarking

We consider the use of novel communication tool sets to improve the performance of robust watermarking systems. In particular, we relate the effects of attacks on the watermark to signal interference in a fading environment and employ diversity transmission and channel estimation principles to improve performance. A nonstationary parallel binary symmetric channel (BSC) model of the watermark channel is introduced to more accurately characterize signal tampering and, hence, extract the watermark. Analysis of the system sheds light on novel strategies and domains to embed information to improve the performance of robust data hiding schemes. Simulation and testing verify our theoretical observations.