Digital Watermarking: Principles & Practice (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Multimedia Information and Systems)

Digital watermarking is a key ingredient to copyright protection. It provides a solution to illegal copying of digital material and has many other useful applications such as broadcast monitoring and the recording of electronic transactions. Now, for the first time, there is a book that focuses exclusively on this exciting technology. Digital Watermarking covers the crucial research findings in the field: it explains the principles underlying digital watermarking technologies, describes the requirements that have given rise to them, and discusses the diverse ends to which these technologies are being applied. As a result, additional groundwork is laid for future developments in this field, helping the reader understand and anticipate new approaches and applications.

* Emphasizes the underlying watermarking principles that are relevant for all media: images, video, and audio.
* Discusses a wide variety of applications, theoretical principles, detection and embedding concepts and the key properties of digital watermarks--robustness, fidelity, data payload, and security
* Examines copyright protection and many other applications, including broadcast monitoring, transaction tracking, authentication, copy control, and device control.
* Presents a series of detailed examples called "Investigations" that illustrate key watermarking concepts and practices.
* Includes an appendix in the book and on the web containing the source code for the examples.
* Includes a comprehensive glossary of watermarking terminology

Theoretical issues are left for a tiny appendix, and not much use of it is made throughout the book. This is comprehensible in a book aimed to be an unified introduction to the subject. The notation that has been introduced in the very first papers by the authors is still used and it does not seem to be appropriate to present more elaborated theoretical developments. But again, this is justified when formality is being traded off by insight development and intuitive treatment. As a last critic, since virtually the whole book is devoted to image watermarking, maybe the next editions (I hope there will be more !) of this book should include the word "image" in the title.
This book will certainly boost your understanding about background concepts and shed more light on the overlapping among different research areas in digital watermarking.


Finally!   November 9, 2001
 3 out of 5 found this review helpful

Finally a good review of this field. I haven't read the whole thing, but what I've read, I like. Well written, good table of contents. I've skimmed the whole book and looked at some of the source code. Code is easy to understand. This is not simply a long research paper or a collection of research papers, it is more like a text book. Glossary is helpful too.


Watermarking demistified   November 8, 2001
 0 out of 6 found this review helpful

The book explain watermarking technology and uses fine but in order to help users to understand it better.