Formalization of Complete Quality Preservation and Reversible Data Hiding

Digital content has revolutionized how we learn, work, and play, while some individuals such as influencers have made good fortunes with it. To put the importance of digital content into context, one example is the local digital creative content industry (Upin-Ipin, Boboiboy), which is thriving and is now worth more than RM7 billion. To safeguard digital contents, they are commonly protected by utilizing a combination of technologies and protocols, where data hiding (watermarking) is one of the important components. Traditionally, a content is modified to accommodate additional data, which can be utilized for various verification and tracking purposes. Although the modified content is perceived to be similar to the original content, the quality of the content is inevitably degraded, and worse, these modification are often irreversible. Quality degradation may negatively impact the intended applications, especially for court-case, medical, military, and recently, AI applications. Therefore, this project aims to hide data in various digital content without introducing any distortion. The notion of complete quality preservation in data hiding is first formalized using information theory, and quality preserving approaches are investigated for traditional and untraditional digital content. This research departs from the conventional framework of data hiding and avoids the curse of quality degradation. It contributes to various domains, including content protection and combating malicious AI by ensuring the training data is genuine and accurate. Furthermore, using the inserted data, the finding of this project can be deployed to facilitate the interactions among different enabling technologies in IR4.0, hence contributing directly to the National Policy on Industry 4.0. Moreover, this project contributes to the "cyber-security & encryption" horizontal in the 10-10 MySTIE framework, and has the potential to be coupled with any of the vertical of Malaysian socio-economic drivers.