Target audience.

Master students in computer science (specialization in algorithms and machine learning or bioinformatics or security) , applied mathematics (specialization statistical learning or e.g. stochastics) or statistics.

Description.

Information Hiding (IH) is a topic that plays a very important role in providing of information security and copy right protection. IH consists of two parts : digital steganography (SG) and digital watermarking (WM). SG,the art of information hiding in apparently innocuous objects or images. It is a field with a rich heritage , and an area of rapid current development. WM provides a copyright protection of video and audio products in a court against multimedia pirates. WM allows to provide also integrity of different audio and video objects without a necessity of extra size for embedding of digital signatures. On the other hand IH is based on very rich mathematics , including probability theory , information and coding theory , signal processing. All IH procedures for embedding of additional information into cover objects can be completely described by computer programs. Therefore this discipline is especially useful for students specialized in computer science. IH opens rich opportunities to design new SG and WM systems ,including proposals of patents , submission of research papers and preparation of Ph.D thesis. Some companies are interested to recruit persons who are well known with IH area.

Prerequisites.

Computer science majors: Bachelor’s recommended. It should include the following mathematics courses: calculus, linear algebra ,introduction to probability theory. It is also very useful (but not necessary!) to have some knowledge in information theory, coding theory and digital image processing.

Contents.

The goals of SG and WM. Typical cover objects. Embedded information.SG against cryptography. The main attacks on SG. Criteria of SG efficiency. Embedding in the least significant bits. The main detection algorithms. Real World of SG. Spread spectrum based SG. Linguistic SG. Graphic SG. Network SG. Ideal and almost ideal SG. Leibler-Kullback divergence. Bhattacharya distance. Model based SG. Perturbed quantization SG. Hugo project.SG based on noisy channels. Blind steganalysis.

Criteria of WM systems efficiency. The main applications of WM. WM embedding and extraction technique. Concatenated WM systems. Embedding with informed encoder. Sophisticated attacks on WM. Coalition attacks on WM. System attacks on WM. Content authentication by WM. A peculiarity of audio WM. Capacity of SG and WM systems.