Watermarking Systems Engineering

The rapid growth of the Internet has fueled the demand for enhanced watermarking and data hiding technologies and has stimulated research into new ways to implement watermarking systems in the real world. This book presents the fundamental principles of watermarking system design and discusses state-of-the-art technologies in information concealment and recovery. It highlights the requirements and challenges of applications in security, image/video indexing, hidden communications, image captioning, and transmission error recovery and concealment. It explains the foundations of digital watermarking technologies, and offers an understanding of new approaches and applications, and lays the groundwork for future developments in the field.

Mauro Barni is Associate Professor, Information Engineering Department, University of Siena, Italy. The author of more than 100 papers published in international journals and conference proceedings, he is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, for which he serves as member of the Multimedia Signal Processing Technical Committee (MMSP-TC). He is associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Multimedia. He received the B.S. degree (1991) in electronic engineering and the Ph.D. degree (1995) in informatics and telecommunications from the University of Florence, Italy. Franco Bartolini is Assistant Professor, Faculty of Engineering, University of Florence, Italy. The author or coauthor of numerous professional publications, he holds three patents. His research interests include image sequence processing for machine vision and video coding, image and video watermarking, and the development of secure protocols for trading copyrighted materials. He received the B.Sc. degree (1991) in electronic engineering and the Ph.D. degree (1996) from the University of Florence, Italy.