San Francisco, Calif. — January 31, 2011 — The Digital Watermarking Alliance (DWA), the international alliance of industry leading organizations delivering valuable digital watermarking solutions, today announced that last week at the IS&T/SPIE Electronic Imaging Conference, it granted an award to a team of researchers for a paper that demonstrates originality, creativity, clarity and potential impact on the field of watermarking. The 2010 Best Paper award was presented by Adnan Alattar, co-chair of the SPIE Media Watermarking, Security, and Forensics XIII conference.

“Once again we applaud the efforts of the research community for its advanced research and innovation in digital watermarking technology,” said Graham Oakes, Chairman of the DWA. “Year after year we continue to see the development of a wide range of successful commercial applications of digital watermarking technology that address real challenges and power valuable applications for a variety of industries.”

The award was granted to Tomas Filler, Jan Judas and Jessica Fridrich, from the Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Binghamton University, New York. The winning team received a cash prize of $1,500, and their paper will be publicized in this year’s proceedings of the conference. Filler and Fridrich were also members of the award-winning team that took the first-place award for the 2009 Best Paper.

The winning paper, entitled “Minimizing Embedding Impact in Steganography using Trellis-Coded Quantization,” proposed and developed a practical algorithm to minimizing the average embedding distortion in steganography based on syndrome coding and trellis-coded quantization. This algorithm can achieve performance arbitrarily close to the theoretical bound.”

“I like to call this work a “Swiss-Army Knife” for steganographers — practitioners,” said Jessica Fridrich, a Professor at SUNY Binghamton and one of the winning paper’s authors. “It is a very general and elegant framework that allows one to build steganographic algorithms that operate close to their theoretical optimum and with low complexity.”

In order to be nominated for the award, the chair of each watermarking session at SPIE’10’s Media Forensics and Security XII conference was requested to nominate excellent papers from his/her session. Six excellent papers were nominated for these prizes. The Best Paper Selection Committee then reviewed these papers, from which they selected the winner. The Selection Committee consisted of Prof. Nasir Memon, Polytechnic Institute of NYU; Prof. Edward Delp, Purdue University; and Dr. Adnan Alattar, Digimarc Corporation.

The DWA will sponsor the DWA Best Paper Award again in 2011. Nominations for this award will take place during this year’s 2011 Electronic Imaging Conference.

About the Digital Watermarking

The Digital Watermarking Alliance (DWA) is an international alliance of industry leading companies that deliver valuable digital watermarking technology and solutions to a broad range of customers and markets around the world. Member companies include aquaMobile, Civolution, DataMark, Digimarc, ISAN, MarkAny, MSI, Université Catholique de Louvain, and Verimatrix. For more information, please visit www.digitalwatermarkingalliance.org

CONTACT: For media inquiries, please contact Gina Giachetti of About Communications, Tel: 510-858-8111, E-mail: ginag@aboutcomms.com