Short Course: Fundamentals of Watermarking and Data Hiding
COURSE DESCRIPTION:
In this 5-hour short course, we present some recent approaches to modeling watermarking, data hiding, and steganography as communication problems. We first overview the watermarking problem (low payload) and show how it can be formulated as a problem of shaping host signal statistics. We further describe how several popular watermarking techniques fit into this model and describe their performance. We also review the data hiding and steganography problems (high payload) and reduce them to channel coding problems. The unifying theme is that watermarking and data hiding algorithms can be developed systematically based on a few simple but fundamental principles. The theory will be illustrated with applications to image processing.
PREREQUISITE: probability and digital communications at a beginning graduate level
HIGH-LEVEL COURSE OUTLINE:
- Early Work: spread-spectrum techniques and LSB techniques
- Binning schemes; modern quantization-based codes: ideas and basic constructions
- Performance analysis for watermarking systems: error probabilities
- Data Hiding: relation to communication with side information, capacity analysis, random binning, application to images.
- Advanced topics: desynchronization attacks, steganography
Instructor Biography
Pierre Moulin received his doctoral degree from Washington University in St. Louis in 1990, after which he joined at Bell Communications Research in Morristown, New Jersey, as a Research Scientist. In 1996, he joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is currently Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Research Professor at the Beckman Institute and the Coordinated Science Laboratory, and affiliate professor in the Department of Statistics.
His fields of professional interest are image and video processing, compression, statistical signal processing and modeling, media security, information theory, and the application of multiresolution signal analysis and fast algorithms to these areas.
Dr. Moulin serves or has served on the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing. He is also Guest Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing's supplement series on Secure Media, and Editor-in-Chief of the upcoming IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security. He has served IEEE in various other capacities, including technical committees, conference organization and more recently the IEEE Signal Processing Society Board of Governors.
He received a 1997 Career award from the National Science Foundation and a IEEE Signal Processing Society 1997 Senior Best Paper award. He is also co-author (with Juan Liu) of a paper that received an IEEE Signal Processing Society 2002 Young Author Best Paper award. He is an IEEE Fellow and was 2003 Beckman Associate of UIUC's Center for Advanced Study.