Since the mid 1990s, data hiding has been proposed as an enabling technology for securing multimedia communication and is now used in various applications including broadcast monitoring, movie fingerprinting, steganography, video indexing and retrieval and image authentication. Data hiding and cryptographic techniques are often combined to complement each other, thus triggering the development of a new research field of multimedia security. Besides, two related disciplines, steganalysis and data forensics, are increasingly attracting researchers and becoming another new research field of multimedia security. This journal, LNCS Transactions on Data Hiding and Multimedia Security, aims to be a forum for all researchers in these emerging fields, publishing both original and archival research results. The seven papers included in this special issue were carefully reviewed and selected from 21 submissions. They address the challenges faced by the emerging area of visual cryptography and provide the readers with an overview of the state of the art in this field of research.

Since the mid 1990s, data hiding has been proposed as an enabling technology for securing multimedia communication, and is now used in various applications including broadcast monitoring, movie fingerprinting, steganography, video indexing and retrieval, and image authentication. Data hiding and cryptographic techniques are often combined to complement each other, thus triggering the development of a new research field of multimedia security. Besides, two related disciplines, steganalysis and data forensics, are increasingly attracting researchers and becoming another new research field of multimedia security. This journal, LNCS Transactions on Data Hiding and Multimedia Security, aims to be a forum for all researchers in these emerging fields, publishing both original and archival research results. This issue consists mainly of a special section on content protection and forensics including four papers. The additional paper deals with histogram-based image hashing for searching content-preserving copies.

Since the mid 1990s, data hiding has been proposed as an enabling technology for securing multimedia communication and is now used in various applications including broadcast monitoring, movie fingerprinting, steganography, video indexing and retrieval and image authentication. Data hiding and cryptographic techniques are often combined to complement each other, thus triggering the development of a new research field of multimedia security. Besides, two related disciplines, steganalysis and data forensics, are increasingly attracting researchers and becoming another new research field of multimedia security. This journal, LNCS Transactions on Data Hiding and Multimedia Security, aims to be a forum for all researchers in these emerging fields, publishing both original and archival research results. The six papers included in this issue deal with watermarking security, perceptual image hashing, infrared hiding, steganography and steganalysis.

This inaugural issue of the LNCS Transactions on Data Hiding and Multimedia Security contains five papers dealing with a wide range of topics related to multimedia security, from a survey of problems related to watermark security to an introduction to the concept of Personal Entertainment Domains (PED) in Digital Rights Management (DRM) schemes.

Since the mid 1990s, data hiding has been proposed as an enabling technology for securing multimedia communication, and is now used in various applications including broadcast monitoring, movie fingerprinting, steganography, video indexing and retrieval, and image authentication. Data hiding and cryptographic techniques are often combined to complement each other, thus triggering the development of a new research field of multimedia security. Besides, two related disciplines, steganalysis and data forensics, are increasingly attracting researchers and becoming another new research field of multimedia security. This journal, LNCS Transactions on Data Hiding and Multimedia Security, aims to be a forum for all researchers in these emerging fields, publishing both original and archival research results. This special issue contains five selected papers that were presented at the Workshop on Pattern Recognition for IT Security, held in Darmstadt, Germany, in September 2010, in conjunction with the 32nd Annual Symposium of the German Association for Pattern Recognition, DAGM 2010. It demonstrates the broad range of security-related topics that utilize graphical data. The contributions explore the security and reliability of biometric data, the power of machine learning methods to differentiate forged images from originals, the effectiveness of modern watermark embedding schemes and the use of information fusion in steganalysis.

This second issue in the LNCS Transactions on Data Hiding and Multimedia Security contains five papers dealing with a wide range of topics related to multimedia security. Coverage includes an introduction to Fingercasting, which allows joint fingerprinting and decryption of broadcast messages; a presentation on estimation attack on content-based video fingerprinting; and a survey on various blind and robust watermarking schemes for 3D shapes.

LNCS Transactions on Data Hiding and Multimedia Security provides a forum for all researchers in these emerging fields, publishing both original and archival research results. This third issue covers steganography and digital watermarking.