TDW3431 Digital Watermarking Trimester 1, 2014/2015

Tutorial 4
(Lecture 4)

1. Differentiate direct message coding from multisymbol message coding.

 Direct message coding is the most straightforward approach to message coding, where a
unique, predefined message mark is assigned to each message.

 Multisymbol message coding maps message into sequences of symbols (source coding), and
subsequently maps the symbol sequences into message marks (modulation).

2. Discuss the key issue of designing message marks.

 Each message mark should be chosen to have good behavior with respect to predictable false
positive rate, fidelity, robustness, and so on.

 However, in addition to these issues, we must also consider the likelihood that one message
mark will be confused with another.

 Before being detected, the message mark is likely to be corrupted, either by the embedding
algorithm (due to clipping, round-off, perceptual shaping, and so on), or by subsequent
processing.

 If this corruption changes the message mark too much, the watermark might be erroneously
decoded as a different message.

 Thus we wish to choose a set of message marks that have good code separation (i.e., marks
that are far apart from one another in marking space).

3. Define “good code separation” in your own words, if linear correlation is used as the detection
metric.

 If linear correlation or normalized correlation is used as detection metric, achieving good code
separation means ensuring that the message marks have low correlations with one another.

 The best case, in fact, is to arrange for each message mark to have a negative correlation
with each of the others, because this would mean that embedding one message mark would
decrease the correlations between the watermarked work and the other message marks, thus
decreasing the chances that a different message mark will be detected.

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TDW3431 Digital Watermarking Trimester 1, 2014/2015

4. Modulation can be performed in a variety of ways, including time-division multiplexing, space-

division multiplexing, frequency-division multiplexing, and code-division multiplexing. Describe
each of these modulation techniques using your own words.

 Time-division multiplexing represents symbols with temporally disjoint watermark patterns,

i.e., dividing a work in the temporal domain, and embedding one symbol in each segment.

 Space-division multiplexing represents symbols with spatially disjoint watermark patterns,

i.e., dividing a work in the spatial domain, and embedding one symbol in each segment.

 Frequency-division multiplexing represents symbols with patterns that are disjoint in the
frequency domain, i.e., dividing a work in the frequency domain, and embedding one symbol
in each segment.

 Code-Division Multiplexing represents symbols with patterns that overlap in time/space and
frequency but have zero correlation with one another, i.e., using a different reference mark for
each possible combination of symbol and sequence location.

5. Suggest a way to spatially embed a sequence of four symbols into an image of 512 by 512 pixels.

 The sequence of symbols can be embedded through space-division multiplexing.

 Given the image of 512 by 512 pixels, the reference mark of each symbol is embedded into
each of the four spatial domains of 256 by 256 pixels.

 Students can also suggest embedding the four symbols into an image using code-division
multiplexing.

6. Describe the general purposes of error correction coding in your own words.

 Error correction coding (ECC) increases the code separation of multi-symbol sequences by
increasing the lengths of the symbol sequences, bringing their performance closer to that of
random codes.

 When presented with a corrupted sequence, an ECC decoder would look for the code word that
differs from it in the fewest number of bits.

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TDW3431 Digital Watermarking Trimester 1, 2014/2015

7. Decoding a trellis-coded message is a matter of finding the most likely path through the trellis. This
can be found efficiently using an algorithm known as a Viterbi decoder. Describe the Viterbi
algorithm.

 The Viterbi algorithm relies on the fact that the most likely path through each node in the
trellis always includes the most likely path up to that node.

 Thus, once we have found the most likely path from A0 to some node further in to the trellis,
we can forget about all the other possible paths from A0 to that node.

 The algorithm proceeds by traversing the trellis from left to right.

 For each of the states in the columns of the trellis, it keeps track of the most likely path so far
from A0 to that state, and the total inner product between the received vector and the
reference marks along the path.

 In each iteration, it updates these paths and products.

 When it reaches the end of the trellis (i.e., the end of the coded message), it has found the most
likely path from A0 to each of the states.