If you need a detailed snapshot of the current state of the art in multimedia security and rights management, this book is probably your best source. If you are designing hardware or software to address multimedia security or rights management issues, or are looking for an in-depth study of these topics, then this is not the right book to start out with. This book is written as an overview, of the type one would find, for example, in The Proceedings of the IEEE. It provides much more detail than a journal overview, but it is not a design companion or a textbook.

The book has 15 chapters, grouped into three parts. Part 1 (containing chapter 1) provides a nontechnical introduction to multimedia security and rights management.

Part 2, which contains the next seven chapters, is devoted to multimedia cryptography. There is not a tutorial section on basic number theoretic or abstract algebra concepts, nor are these presented in an appendix; for deeper understanding, the reader has to either be conversant with these topics, or have a suitable reference on them available. This part of the book contains, in pseudocode format, about two dozen encryption algorithms for multimedia image/video data, as well as a thorough discussion of the secure encoding of speech and audio data. A major point here is that multimedia encryption doesn’t really need to be as strong as encryption for banking or secure communications, or other similar purposes. Multimedia encryption can be considered to perform well if a user cannot benefit aesthetically from the contents without the decryption key; for example, an exceedingly noisy audio file, even if some of it might be recognizable, or a garbled video or image, is assumed to be exactly the opposite of what a consumer of multimedia material would like to experience. There exist several algorithms that will ensure that the above “defects” will occur if unauthorized access is attempted: a good number of these are presented in the book. Another issue in encrypting multimedia data is that this type of data may form patterns, which eventually could provide a potential code breaker with indirect clues on how to break the encryption. These issues are also discussed in some detail in this second part.

Part 3 is entirely devoted to watermarking. Watermarking is, roughly, the process by which proprietary information is embedded in the image/video/audio data, in such a way that it is essentially invisible to a consumer with the right to use the contents. If such a right has not been granted or purchased, however, the embedded proprietary information “unhides,” and, for example, can show itself as a copyright violation banner (in the case of unauthorized copying) across the screen of a video, or in another similarly revealing manner. Signal processing techniques used in watermarking are presented in somewhat more depth than were cryptography-related ones in the second part of the book. A chapter is devoted to the watermarking of binary images, such as graphics or schematics. Techniques for audio watermarking have not found their way into this survey book. Some voice scrambling and audio cryptography principles are discussed in Part 2, but none is an audio watermarking scheme.

Overall, I found the book to be very useful for making a first acquaintance with cryptography and watermarking technologies for multimedia security and digital rights management. Besides the usual academic and engineering audience, this work could be recommended to technically involved marketing individuals who deal with multimedia products and services.