From watermarking to in-band enrichment: Theoretical and applicative trends

Fostered by the emerging Knowledge Society, the enriched media is nowadays a very challenging research topic, be it considered either from academic or from industrial perspectives. In its largest acceptation, enriched media refers to all possible associations established between some original data (video, audio, 3D, ... and some metadata (textual, audio, video, executable codes, ...). Such a new content may be further exploited for various applications, like interactive HDTV, computer games, or data mining, for instance. This chapter is meant to bring into evidence the role watermarking techniques may play in this new applicative field. Following the watermarking philosophy, the in-band enrichment supposed that the enrichment data are inserted into the very data to be enriched. Thus, three main advantages are ensured: backward compatibility, format coherence, and virtually no network overhead. The discussion is structured on both theoretical aspects (the accurate evaluation of the watermarking capacity in several real-life scenarios) and on applications developed under the framework of the R & D contracts conducted at the ARTEMIS Department, Institut TELECOM.