Smart Media: Empower Media with Active Data Hiding

The seamless development in computing, networking, communication, and signal processing is making media a more and more important part of our daily lives. The passive nature of media, however, limits the capability of it. In this paper, we introduce the notion of 'smart' media which carry additional active information imperceptibly in the media content itself for added interactive-ability. With smart media, traditional information access -- from single medium to multimedia -- can be enhanced with new, two-way communication abilities. Active data hiding, endowed with perceptual intelligent high capacity data hiding techniques, is used to embed an agent imperceptibly into a medium. It infuses mobility to the passive data stream by introducing personality and controllability into the medium. The design of active data hiding system for smart media shall be discussed, along with a variety of applications.