A Note on Watermark Development from the Commercial Context

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Note on Watermark Development from the Commercial Context David Hilton Signum Technologies, Witney, UK Email: [email protected] Received 6 November 2001 The question is raised as to whether or not the currently developed theories of watermarking provide an adequate model for the handling of digital data in the commercial world. Keywords and phrases: watermarking, commercial, quality metrics data, modelling, screening.

1. INTRODUCTION The development of watermarking theories seems to have reached something of an impasse in much the same way as many previous attempts to model real situations using mathematical tools. After several reasonable methods were introduced in the early nineties the development followed the usual route of grabbing a few well-accepted mathematical techniques and attempting to apply them rather than investigating the practical contexts and seeking to model them. Thus the process has attempted to follow the route of reductionist theories where the formalism is well established and the problem is to apply the theory in different contexts. A more appropriate paradigm should perhaps have resembled Darwin’s development of understanding of evolution where a myriad contexts are explored to whether they confirm or undermine the proposed theory. The contrast between the methodology of small commercial enterprises and the academic world in dealing with images is to some extent instructive. The commercial developers start from a strong knowledge base in the practical handling of images at all stages and then seize whatever information they can from the various theorists. Development time is at a premium and so decisions about preferred methods must be taken very quickly. The academic world starts with a broad knowledge of signal processing, cryptography, error correction algorithms, and the like and more or less looks for a situation in which to apply them. The image world is more messy than the audio world because the actual medium of paper and ink is less well defined and thus the theories have struggled more to describe images than audio. The need for some sort of dialectic arising from the commercial and the academic would seem to offer positive benefits. An important practical issue which arises from this is

the consideration of whether there can be a single algorithm which covers the watermarking of digital media, images, and audio, of all qualities and for all purposes. The academic approach would work in favor of a single watermarking algorithm without the pressure experienced in commercial terms to be properly adaptive to different contexts. This note raises issues about the development of watermarking and the extent to which it has confronted the practical problems. It then considers how the type of watermark might be influenced by such considerations. 2.

PARADIGMS FOR DEVELOPMENT OF WATERMARKING

The development of JPEG provided an illustrative paradigm for the development of watermarking theories both in its strengths and weaknesses. The starting point was the human visual system based on gen

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