Performance analysis of spread spectrum modulation in data hiding
Litao Gang, Ali N. Akansu, Mahalingam Ramkumar · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2001
Watermarking or steganography technology provides a possible solution in digital multimedia copyright protection and pirate tracking. Most of the current data hiding schemes are based on spread spectrum modulation. A small value watermark signal is embedded into the content signal in some watermark domain. The information bits can be extracted via correlation. The schemes are applied both in escrow and oblivious cases. This paper reveals, through analysis and simulation, that in oblivious applications where the original signal is not available, the commonly used correlation detection is not optimal. Its maximum likelihood detection is analyzed and a feasible suboptimal detector is derived. Its performance is explored and compared with the correlation detector. Subsequently a linear embedding scheme is proposed and studied. Experiments with image data hiding demonstrates its effectiveness in applications.