A New Watermarking Scheme Based on Antipodal Binary Dirty Paper Coding

We investigate the performance of a watermarking system in which the encoder is forced to use a binning strategy based on antipodal binary-valued sequences. The use of antipodal binary random binning has several advantages, including the possibility of relying on simple and effective binary code constructions and the ease with which this kind of schemes can cope with amplitude scaling. By relying on a novel binning strategy, we derive a lower bound of the Gelfand-Pinsker capacity of the watermark channel when the encoder is forced to use an antipodal binary auxiliary random variable, showing that for low to moderate bit-rates, the bound coincides with Costa's capacity. We exploit the properties of the new binning strategy, to develop a practical watermarking system and show that the new scheme outperforms previous constructions, exhibiting very good performance also in the presence of gain attack. Preliminary results on audio signals show that the new scheme retains its good performance also when used for the watermarking of real multimedia data.