A Communication System Model for Digital Image Watermarking Problems

As the Internet becomes more and more populous, people concern more about the copyright protection issue for digital data such as images and audio. Digital watermarking technique can hide data in images or audio to indicate the data owner or recipient. Therefore, it can protect the copyright. There were a lot of papers discussing how to embed watermark into images in recent years. However, few papers analyzed the watermark techniques in a theoretical point of view. In this paper, we interpret the watermarking problem as a digital communication problem. There are three main criteria concerning the performance of a watermarking techniquecapacity, imperceptibility, and robustness. We then show the trade-o 's between these three criteria adopting concepts from the digital communication theory.