Patent ID: 6233347
Filing Date: 2001-05-15
Classification: H04H

Abstract:
A system that watermarks a host signal with a watermark signal, the watermark signal comprising watermark-signal components, each having one of a plurality of watermark-signal values, and the host signal comprising host-signal components, each having one of a plurality of host-signal values, the system comprising:a pre-processor that operates on one or more primary-signal components of at least one primary signal to generate one or more transformed host-signal components and one or more transformed watermark-signal components;an ensemble designator that designates a plurality of embedding generators, each corresponding to a single watermark-signal value of a co-processed group of one or more transformed watermark-signal components;an embedding value generator that generates, by each embedding generator, a plurality of embedding values, the total of each plurality of embedding values comprising a first embedding-value set, wherein at least one embedding value generated by a first embedding generator is not the same as any embedding value generated by a second embedding generator;a point coder that sets at least one host-signal value of one or more selected transformed host-signal components to a first embedding value of a third embedding generator, thereby forming a composite-signal value, wherein the third embedding generator corresponds to a first watermark-signal value of the group of co-processed transformed watermark-signal components, and wherein the first embedding value is selected based at least in part on its proximity to the at least one host-signal value, and wherein at least one embedding interval of one embedding generator is not the same as any embedding interval of at least one other embedding generator; andan information extractor that extracts the first watermark-signal value from the first embedding value, said information extractor comprising:a synchronizer that acquires a composite signal including the composite-signal value;an ensemble replicator that replicates the first embedding-value set to form a second embedding-value set, each embedding value of the second embedding-value set having the same correspondence to a single watermark-signal value as has the one embedding value of the first embedding-value set from which it is replicated;a point decoder that selects a second embedding value, the second embedding value being an embedding value that is the closest of all embedding values of the second embedding-value set in distance to the composite-signal value of the second embedding-value set based on its proximity to the composite-signal value, and that sets the first watermark-signal value to a one of the plurality of watermark-signal values to which the second embedding value corresponds.