SYSTEM, METHOD, AND PRODUCT FOR INFORMATION EMBEDDING USING AN ENSEMBLE OF NON-INTERSECTING EMBEDDING GENERATORS

A system, method, and product are provided to (1) pre-process one or more primary signals to generate a transformed host-signal and/or a transformed watermark-signal; (2) embed one or more watermarked signals and/or transformed watermark signals into a host signal and/or the transformed host signal, thereby generating a composite signal, (2) optionally enable the composite signal to be transmitted over a communication channel, and (3) optionally extract the watermark signal from the transmitted composite signal. An embedding value may be the closest of all embedding values generated by an embedding generator to a host-signal value that is to be quantized. Embedding values may be based on a trellis-coded pre-determined relationship between embedding values, or on predetermined relationships based on lattice quantization. The method may also include a fourth step of extracting the first watermark-signal value from a composite-signal value to form a reconstructed watermark-signal value. The present invention may also implement adaptive embedding and, in some implementations, super-rate quantization. For example, the invention may be a system that includes an ensemble designator that designates a plurality of adaptive embedding generators, each corresponding to a single watermark-signal value of a co-processed group of one or more watermark-signal components. Also included in this implementation is an adaptive embedding value generator that generates, by each adaptive embedding generator, a plurality of adaptive embedding values.