Optimization of watermarking performances using error correcting codes and repetition

With the ever-increasing development and usage of digital technologies and digital data, the question of protecting intellectual property of digital data has becoming more and more important. Digital watermarking, which allows to embed copyright information into the digital data, has become more and more indispensable. Due to its characteristics, one of the problems in digital watermarking for fixed images is to decide how to hide in an image as many bits of information (or signature) as possible while ensuring that the signature can be correctly retrieved at the detecting stage, even after various image manipulation including attacks, Error correcting codes and repetition are the natural choices to use in order to correct possible errors when extracting the signature. In this paper, we have investigated different ways of applying error correcting codes, repetition and some combinations of the two, given different capacities of a fixed image for different error rates of the watermarking channel, in order to obtain optimal selection for a given length of signature. We present both the qualitative and quantitative results. The goal of this work is to explore applying coding methods for watermarking purpose.