The advances in the generation and processing of multimedia data (e. g. documents, images, video, audio, animations, etc. ) have had an immense impact on multimedia applications and, as a result, multimedia has permeated almost every aspect of our daily lives. This development has also brought with it a whole host of issues and ch- lenges which were either not as apparent before or were non-existent. Today, digital media is relied upon as primary news and information resource, as evidence in a court of law, as part of medical records or as financial documents. However, there is still lack of authoritative mechanisms to verify the origin and veracity of media data. - deed, multimedia content has become an extremely valuable asset, and it is being both disseminated and consumed on a larger scale than ever before, but the issues conce- ing how the content owners and publishers should control the distribution of and - cess to their content have not been satisfactorily resolved yet. There are various other issues related to use of multimedia that require further analysis and research. For example, it is a known fact that some criminal organi- tions communicate with its members by posting information embedded media to p- lic forums and web-sites to evade surveillance by law enforcement. Conventional multimedia processing approaches do not provide sufficiently effective means for - fending against such communication.

The advances in the generation and processing of multimedia data (e. g. documents, images, video, audio, animations, etc. ) have had an immense impact on multimedia applications and, as a result, multimedia has permeated almost every aspect of our daily lives. This development has also brought with it a whole host of issues and ch- lenges which were either not as apparent before or were non-existent. Today, digital media is relied upon as primary news and information resource, as evidence in a court of law, as part of medical records or as financial documents. However, there is still lack of authoritative mechanisms to verify the origin and veracity of media data. - deed, multimedia content has become an extremely valuable asset, and it is being both disseminated and consumed on a larger scale than ever before, but the issues conce- ing how the content owners and publishers should control the distribution of and - cess to their content have not been satisfactorily resolved yet. There are various other issues related to use of multimedia that require further analysis and research. For example, it is a known fact that some criminal organi- tions communicate with its members by posting information embedded media to p- lic forums and web-sites to evade surveillance by law enforcement. Conventional multimedia processing approaches do not provide sufficiently effective means for - fending against such communication.

Multimedia technologies are becoming more sophisticated, enabling the Internet to accommodate a rapidly growing audience with a full range of services and efficient delivery methods. Although the Internet now puts communication, education, commerce and socialization at our finger tips, its rapid growth has raised some weighty security concerns with respect to multimedia content. The owners of this content face enormous challenges in safeguarding their intellectual property, while still exploiting the Internet as an important resource for commerce.
Data Hiding Fundamentals and Applications focuses on the theory and state-of-the-art applications of content security and data hiding in digital multimedia. One of the pillars of content security solutions is the imperceptible insertion of information into multimedia data for security purposes; the idea is that this inserted information will allow detection of unauthorized usage.
* Provides a theoretical framework for data hiding, in a signal processing context;
* Realistic applications in secure, multimedia delivery;
* Compression robust data hiding;
* Data hiding for proof of ownership--WATERMARKING;
* Data hiding algorithms for image and video watermarking.