The Information Hiding Laboratory is a research group led by Dr Neil Hurley and Dr Felix Balado located in the UCD School of Computer Science and Informatics at the University College Dublin, Ireland. There are a number of areas currently under research, including

• audio watermarking;
• software watermarking;
• multimedia indexing;
• steganography and steganalysis;
• collaborative filtering; and
• hardware encoding.

History of the Information Hiding Laboratory

With the recent success of the Internet and the widespread availability of low-cost digital consumer equipment, digital watermarking for multimedia documents has been the focus of attention of a number of people in the search for solutions to copyright infringements. However, the scope of application for digital watermarking is much wider and also includes applications such as steganography, steganalysis, indexing, labelling and/or covert communications.

Since 1995, this research group established at the University College Dublin, Ireland has pioneered work in this field by identifying digital watermarking as an application of digital communications. Over the past few years the group has expanded the number of both post-graduate and post-doctoral researchers and it has also been successful in applying for funding from a number of sources.

Live Demonstration

To give visitors to this site a real feel for information hiding, we have created a live demonstration program of a blind image watermarking scheme. It employs spread-spectrum communication techniques to embed a large amount of information in the luminance component of a 512x512 colour image with very strong robustness to standard image processing operation such as image compression, scaling, filtering, etc... Click on the image to try it!