Coordinated watermarking

摘要

Methods, devices and computer program products enable embedding and extraction of multiple watermark messages in a coordinated fashion to improve watermark transparency, robustness against impairments, security, and computational complexity of embedding and extraction of watermarks. Coordinated watermark embedding and extraction operations take advantage of a pre-defined relationship between the symbols of two watermark messages. The improved aspects of the watermarking system provide significant value to content owners, content distributors, and consumers at a small incremental cost.

主权项

1. A method of embedding watermarks into a host content, comprising:
obtaining a payload of a first watermark message for embedding into the host content; obtaining a payload of a second watermark message that is different from the payload of the first watermark message for embedding into the host content, the second watermark message having a different number of symbols than the first watermark message; and embedding the first and the second watermark messages into the host content in a coordinated fashion such that the embedded first watermark message has a pre-defined relationship with the embedded second watermark message in a particular domain, wherein the symbols of the first watermark message are embedded in interleaved embedding opportunities with the symbols of the second watermark message in the particular domain, and wherein the pre-defined relationship comprises a ratio of the interleaved embedding opportunities allocated to the symbols of the first watermark message to the symbols of the second watermark message, the ratio selected to achieve a particular watermark extraction reliability of the first watermark message.