EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing 
Volume 2004 (2004), Issue 14, Pages 2081-2092
doi:10.1155/S1110865704403072

Facilitating Watermark Insertion by Preprocessing Media

Ingemar J. Cox1 and Matt L. Miller2

1Departments of Computer Science and Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University College London, Adastral Park Postgraduate Campus, Ross Building, Martlesham Heath, Ipswish, Suffolk, IP5 3RE, UK
2NEC Research Institute, 4 Independence Way, Princeton 08540, NJ, USA

Received 5 May 2003; Revised 17 January 2004

Abstract

There are several watermarking applications that require the deployment of a very large number of watermark embedders. These applications often have severe budgetary constraints that limit the computation resources that are available. Under these circumstances, only simple embedding algorithms can be deployed, which have limited performance. In order to improve performance, we propose preprocessing the original media. It is envisaged that this preprocessing occurs during content creation and has no budgetary or computational constraints. Preprocessing combined with simple embedding creates a watermarked Work, the performance of which exceeds that of simple embedding alone. However, this performance improvement is obtained without any increase in the computational complexity of the embedder. Rather, the additional computational burden is shifted to the preprocessing stage. A simple example of this procedure is described and experimental results confirm our assertions.