What is acceptable quality in the application of digital watermarking: trade-offs of security, robustness and quality

Abstract

Quality is subjective, Quality can be objectified by the industry standards process represented by such consumer items as compact disc ("CD") and digital versatile disc ("DVD"). What is lacking is a means for not only associating the creation of valued intangible assets and extensions of recognition but establishing responsibility for copies that may be digitized or pass through a digital domain. Digital watermarking exists at a convergence point between piracy and privacy. Watermarks serve as a receipt for information commerce. There is not likely to be a single digital watermark encoding scheme that best handles the trade-offs between security, robustness, and quality but several architectures to handle various concerns. The most commercially useful watermarking schemes are keybased, combining cryptographic features with models of perception. Most importantly, in audio watermarking there currently exists mature technologies which have been proven to be statistically inaudible. In this paper, a description of several of the decoding system applications, and why watermarks are a necessary feature of any workable market for the commercial exchange of content is highlighted.