A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science, School of Advanced Technologies

Thesis (M.Sc.) - Asian Institute of Technology

Steganography and digital watermarking are two areas of research, which are generally referred to as "information hiding". Both steganography and watermarking describe techniques that are used to imperceptibly convey information by embedding it into the coverdata. However, steganography typically relates to covert point-to-point communication between two parties. Thus, steganographic methods are usually not robust against modification of the data, or have only limited robustness and protect the embedded information against technical modifications that may occur during transmission and storage, like format conversion, compression, or digital-to-analog conversion. Watermarking, on the other hand, has the additional notion of resilience against attempts to remove the hidden data. Thus, watermarking, rather than steganography principles are used whenever the cover-data is available to parties who know the existence of the hidden data and may have an interest removing it. A popular application of watermarking is to give proof of ownership of digital data by embedding copyright statements. It is obvious that for this application the embedded information should be robust against manipulations that may attempt to remove it