CHAPTER 3 – Communication with Side Information and Data Hiding

The theory of data hiding has been developed mainly through employing analytical tools of communication with side information and spread spectrum communications. This is achieved by reinterpreting and adapting basic concepts such as channel, side information, and power constraints within the context of data hiding. In data hiding, the channel is the medium between the hider and the extractor, and it includes all forms of disturbances that affect the stego signal, which is an intelligent combination of the host signal and the message to be conveyed. Side information available at the encoder in a communication channel model is associated with the host signal at the embedder in the equivalent data hiding model. Power constraints in a channel communication scenario are analogous to the perceptual distortion limits that are determined based on the features of the host signal. The bandwidth is dual to embedding signal size, as they are both resources of the communication, and the measure of signal-to-noise ratio corresponds to the measure of embedding-distortion to attack-distortion ratio. Correspondingly, in the dual data hiding problem, the performance of an embedding and detection technique depends on the underlying codeword generation scheme.