Water-filling for watermarking?

Addresses the question of whether water-filling is appropriate for watermarking. The water-filling paradigm is a traditional solution to the capacity maximization of parallel zero-mean additive white Gaussian channels subject to a signal energy constraint. We take an information theoretic approach to analyze the watermark communication problem in the presence of perceptual coding. Our effective watermark channel is modeled as a set of parallel independent zero-mean uniformly distributed additive noise channels. Energy allocation principles are identified to maximize the capacity results. Our findings are compared to the traditional water-filling solution and shed light on strategies to maximize the data hiding rate in the presence of compression