There are many advantages to implementing a watermark-based system using dedicated hardware, rather than using software executing on a general purpose processor. These include higher speed and lower power consumption. However, hardware implementations incur substantial design and development costs. Moreover, because each watermarking application has its own design constraints and parameters, it has not been cost-effective to develop a hardware chip design for each, since such chips would typically not be manufactured in volumes sufficient to bring per-unit costs down to an acceptable level. The present technology provides various techniques for making watermarking hardware adaptable, so that a single chip can serve multiple diverse watermark applications. By so-doing, the advantages of hardware implementation are made available where it was formerly cost-prohibitive, thereby enhancing operation of a great variety of watermark-based systems.