A method of digital watermark decoding in which watermark signal components, which are embedded with different levels of redundancy in a host content signal, are selectively accumulated. In the process of decoding embedded data, components embedded with more redundancy are weighted appropriately to improve recovery of embedded data. Components embedded with less redundancy may be more reliably recovered as well by leveraging knowledge of related components encoded more robustly. Missing, weak or error prone components may be recovered based on relationship with more reliable components, and in particular, based on relationship with components embedded with higher redundancy and decoded with higher reliability. These techniques are exploited through error correction coding schemes, including convolutional codes, and explicit and implicit weighted repetition coding schemes.