H204M — watermarking for media: classification, quality evaluation, design improvements

Security has become one of the most significant problems for spreading new information technology. Beside cryptographic solutions digital watermarking methods offer several protection possibilities. H204M — Watermarking for Media is a joined project at GMD-IPSI (German National Research Center for Information Technology) and the German broadcast archive DRA funded by the German government to classify, evaluate and improve digital watermarking techniques. Today a wide variety of techniques has been proposed but it is quite difficult to classify the approaches and measure their quality. Our intention in this project is to discuss the main watermarking parameter and to present a media independent classification scheme as a basis for quality evaluation. Furthermore one outstanding goal of the project is practical testing of existing techniques in a real scenario at the DRA with the content-management provider tecmath AG. Practical experiences are an essential basis for better design approaches. To date, such integration of watermarking algorithm into content management systems are not evaluated. In parallel a group was established initiated by Fabien Petitcolas to offer a public automated watermarking evaluation service: StirMark Benchmark. In our paper we present the H204M project scenario, first results of the media-independent classification scheme and the StirMark Benchmark evaluation service.