Min's Ph.D. Dissertation
April 2001
 
 

Multimedia   Data   Hiding

 Min   Wu ^{^}
 
Princeton  University

 

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Abstract       Electronic Copy      Presentation     Chapter List 

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Microfilm or bounded hard copy  Hard copies and microfilms of this dissertation are available through University Microfilms International (UMI), possibly starting from Summer 2001.

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^ Min Wu is now a faculty member of ECE - Univ. Maryland at College Park (minwu@eng.umd.edu). 

Disclaimer  Copyright 2001 by  Min Wu. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works, must be obtained from the author.

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Abstract

The digital information revolution has brought about profound changes in our society and our lives. The many advantages of digital information have also generated new challenges and new opportunities for innovation. This thesis discusses the issues regarding multimedia data hiding and its application to multimedia security and communication, addressing both theoretical and practical aspects, and tackling both design and attack problems.

In the fundamental part, we identify a few key elements of data hiding through a layered structure. Data hiding is modeled as a communication problem where the embedded data is the signal to be transmitted. Various embedding mechanisms target different robustness-capacity tradeoffs. We study this tradeoff for two major categories of embedding mechanisms.  In addition, we have found that the unevenly distributed embedding capacity brings difficulty in data hiding. We propose a comprehensive solution to this problem, addressing the considerations for choosing constant or variable embedding rate and enhancing the performance for each case.

In the design part, we present new data hiding algorithms for binary images, grayscale and color images, and videos, covering such applications as annotation, tamper detection, copy/access control, fingerprinting, and ownership protection. The designs provide concrete examples regarding the choice of embedding mechanisms, the selection of modulation/multiplexing technique(s) for hiding multiple bits, and the handling of uneven embedding capacity. Data hiding can also be used in video communication to convey side information for additional functionalities or better performance. This is demonstrated by the novel approaches for real-time transcoding and error concealment.

Because many data hiding applications are in a competitive environment where an adversary has an incentive to obliterate the embedded data, testing the systems' robustness and security via attacks is important. In the attack part, we discuss a number of attacks and countermeasures for data hiding systems. Our investigation begins with three specific types of watermarking schemes, in which full knowledge of the watermarking algorithms is available.  We then study the attack problems for digital music under a unique competitive environment, in which the watermarking algorithms are unknown to analysts. 
 

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Downloadable Electronic Copy
 

• PDF copy of the entire thesis (7.4M Bytes)
   
• See the table of contents below for the PDF files of individual parts or chapters.
   

* update 8/02:  The pdf files of individual parts/chapters are temporarily unavailable.  Please download the above PDF file of the entire thesis.
 

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Presentation

• PDF format of slides for thesis defense talk on 4/16/01 at Princeton Univ. (1.4M Bytes)
   

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Table of Contents
 

• Preface (142K Bytes)

Title page, Abstract, Acknowledgement, and List of Chapters/Tables/Figures.

• Chapter 1   Introduction (131K Bytes)
   
• Part-I   Fundamental Issues and Solutions  (592K Bytes)
   
  *  Chapter 2   Preliminaries (151 KB)
  *  Chapter 3   Classification and Capacity of Embedding Mechanisms  (349 KB)
  *  Chapter 4   Handling Uneven Embedding Capacity (386 KB)
   
• Part-II  Algorithm and System Designs (5.22M Bytes)
   
  *  Chapter 5   Data Hiding in Binary Images (1.03 MB)
  *  Chapter 6   Multimedia Data Hiding for Image and Video (2.68 MB)
  *  Chapter 7   Data Hiding for Image Authentication (689 KB)
  *  Chapter 8   Data Hiding for Video Communication (1.31 MB)
   
• Part-III  Attacks and Countermeasures (1.96M Bytes)
   
  *  Chapter 9   Attacks & Countermeasures for Known Data Hiding Algorithms (1.70 MB)
  *  Chapter 10  Attacks on Unknown Data Hiding Algorithms (based on SDMI challenge, 382 KB)
   
• Chapter 11  Conclusions and Perspectives (68K Bytes)
   
• Bibliography  (categorized, 143K Bytes)

 

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Copyright 2002 Min Wu  All rights reserved. Last modified 1/24/02.