《Digital Image Watermarking and Information Hiding》Course Syllabus

1. Objective & Requirement

Digital watermarking and information hiding are the ascendant technology subjects in information security. A digital watermarking is a mark covertly embedded in a noise-tolerant signal carrier such as an audio, video, image data or other. It is typically used to identify ownership of the copyright of such signal, verify the authenticity or integrity of the carrier signal or to show the identity of its users. Different from digital watermarking, information hiding usually embeds a secret into an unrelated audio, video, image data or other carrier to hide the existence of important information. No matter digital watermarking or information hiding, the embedded mark or hidden secret does not make any distinguishable change or affect carrier actual practice values to meet some visual, auditory, statistical or other invisibility.

This course introduces the basic concepts, models, classical methods and evaluation criteria in digital watermarking and information hiding by using digital images as embedded carriers. The objective of this course is to establish fundamental concepts on digital watermarking and information hiding.

The course will be teaching in full English, all graduate students, including thesis-based and PhD students whose discipline are related to computer science are welcome to select this course. The prerequisite courses are scientific literature retrieval, algorithm design and analysis and object-oriented programming language.

2. Topics to be covered

This course introduces the basic concepts, models, classical methods and evaluation criteria in digital watermarking and information hiding by using digital images as embedded carriers. We will cover the following core topics plus a set of selected topics:

(i)Basic knowledge of image carrier: image type, storage format, color model and transfer method etc.；

(ii)Basic principle of random number generator: basic principle, applications in image scrambling and encryption；

(iii)Hash function: basic principle, applications in image authentication；

(iv) Frequency domain transformation: DFT,DCT and DWT；

(vi)Typical methods of information hiding and digital watermarking in spatial and frequency domain;

(vii) Typical attack methods and evaluation criteria.

3. Textbook

[1] Stefan Katzenbeisser，Fabien A.P. Petitcoals. Information Hiding Techniques for Steganography and Digital Watermarking[M], Boston：Artech House Publishers, 1999.

[2] Ingemar J.Cox, Matthew L. Miller, Jeffrey A. Bloom. Digital Watermarking [M], Burlington: Morgan Kaufmann publishers, 1999.

4. Reference Books

More informative reading materials can be found in international conference on information hiding

5. Course Evaluation (Tentative)

Discussion       30%

Assignments     30%

Course paper     40%