TABLE OF CONTENTS Nikolaos Nikolaidis and Ioannis Pitas
Benchmarking of watermarking algorithms is a complicated task that requires examination of a set of mutually dependent performance indices (algorithmic complexity, decoding/detection performance, perceptual quality). This chapter will try to summarize the basic bench-marking principles and provide a methodology for deriving the corresponding performance metrics. A review of four benchmarking platforms will be also provided.
The development of digital media and services created an urgent need for multimedia security and copyright protection techniques. Watermarking has emerged recently as an important copyright protection tool. Watermarking research evolved with a tremendous speed in the last few years (Macq 1999, Cox et al. 2002), leading to numerous publications in the scientific or patent literature (Cox et al. 2002, Katzenbeisser and Petitcolas 2000). Up to now, watermarking performance evaluation and method comparison has been carried out in a non-standardized way, with no concrete supporting evidence. This lack of efficient and reliable performance evaluation procedures can be mainly attributed to the fact that judging the performance of a watermarking algorithm is a complex task that requires taking into account a number of mutually dependent and competing performance indices. With the watermarking technology entering into a more mature era, backed up by concrete mathematical foundations, it is about time that a systematic and globally accepted benchmarking methodology will be devised. This development would be a benefit for both the watermarking technology suppliers, who could use the benchmark to fine-tune their algorithms and obtain indications on their...
