Abstract: A structured watermark may be embedded in data by applying an irregular mapping of variations defined by the structured watermark to frequency domain values representing the data. In particular, the frequency domain representation of the data comprises an ordered set of frequency domain values. The structured watermark is used to define an ordered set of variations to be applied to the frequency domain values. Each variation is a value defined by the structured watermark. An irregular mapping from positions in the ordered set of variations to positions in the ordered set of frequency domain values is defined. This irregular mapping is one-to-one and invertible. Application of the irregular mapping to the set of variations results in a set of values that may appear to be noise both in the frequency domain and in the signal domain of the data. The signal domain of the data may be n-dimensional, and may be a spatial, temporal or other domain from which data may be converted to the frequency domain.