Joint compression and watermarking: theory, algorithms, and applications

个人多媒体通信涉及电话、电视和计算机的无缝集成，并涉及通过不同渠道将数字媒体高效、可靠和安全地分发和存储给人和机器，这是当今工程发展的一个主要领域。然而，在多媒体通信能够在无线和移动环境等各种环境中成功实现，并将在未来许多年改变我们的生活和经济之前，必须解决许多具有挑战性的问题。其中包括有效利用现有有限存储和带宽资源的数据压缩，以及为数字版权管理提供技术和工具的数字水印。到目前为止，数据压缩和水印在很大程度上是分开研究和设计的。由于在个人多媒体通信中，水印信号很可能以压缩格式存储和/或传输，而不是单独处理水印和压缩，因此研究水印和压缩方案的联合设计是有趣和有益的。在本研究中，我们将系统地研究联合压缩和水印。我们的科学目标是进一步扩展现有的联合压缩和水印的信息理论成果，为联合压缩和水印的新配置建立新的理论框架，通过扩展源编码技术以包括水印功能来设计高效和鲁棒的联合压缩和水印算法，并将我们的成果应用于当前的压缩标准，如用于静态图像压缩的JPEG。MP3和AAC用于音频压缩，MPEG-2和H.264用于视频压缩，了解如何对它们进行优化和修改，以支持水印功能，同时保持甚至提高其压缩性能。

Personal multimedia communications, which involves the seamless integration of the telephone, television, and computer and is concerned with efficient, reliable and secure distribution and storage of digital media to people and machines through different channels, is a major area of growth in engineering today. However, before multimedia communications can happen successfully in various environments such as wireless and mobile environments and will change our lives and economy for many years to come, many challenging problems have to be resolved. Among them are data compresson to efficiently utilize existing limited storage and bandwidth resources, and digital watermarking to provide techniques and tools for digital right management. So far, to a large extent, data compression and watermarking have been investigated and designed separately. Since in personal multimedia communications, watermarked signals will be likely stored and/or transmitted in compressed format, instead of treating watermarking and compression separately, it is interesting and beneficial to look at joint design of watermarking and compression schemes. In this research, we will investigate joint compression and watermarking systematically. Our scientific objectives are to further extend existing information theoretic results on joint compression and watermarking, to establish new theoretic frameworks for new configurations of joint compression and watermarking, to design efficient and robust joint compression and watermarking algorithms by extending source coding techniques to include watermarking capability, and to apply our results to current compression standards such as JPEG for still image compression, MP3 and AAC for audio compression, and MPEG-2 and H.264 for video compression, to see how they can be optimized and modified to support watermarking capability while maintaining or even improving their compression performance.