Digital Watermarking is definitely the first book to present in an unified approach the foundations of digital watermarking. The text is clear and didactic, following Cox, Miller and Bloom's writing style that has been evident in their seminal research papers. Very little previous knowledge on communications and information theory is required to follow the book, and still there is an appendix covering the background concepts on these subjects.
The topics are developed in an intuitive fashion, resorting to geometric analogies whenever possible, and the proposed programming experiments (which are backed up by source code both in an appendix and on-line) allow the reader to develop valuable insights on the concepts. Watermarking with side information, message coding as well as error analysis are extensively developed. A very "juicy" chapter is devoted to the applications and motivation of digital watermarking, covering timeliness subjects such as DVD copy control and the SDMI.
Theoretical issues are left for a tiny appendix, and not much use of it is made throughout the book. This is comprehensible in a book aimed to be an unified introduction to the subject. The notation that has been introduced in the very first papers by the authors is still used and it does not seem to be appropriate to present more elaborated theoretical developments. But again, this is justified when formality is being traded off by insight development and intuitive treatment. As a last critic, since virtually the whole book is devoted to image watermarking, maybe the next editions (I hope there will be more !) of this book should include the word "image" in the title.
This book will certainly boost your understanding about background concepts and shed more light on the overlapping among different research areas in digital watermarking.
