Abstract. Many coded digital watermarking systems development requires first the selection of a (uncoded) modulation technique to be part of a coded architecture. Therefore, performance bounds for uncoded techniques are an important tool for coded system optimization, aiming at operation close to capacity. This paper introduces a new performance lower bound for uncoded binary watermarking modulation techniques, based on a simple equivalence with a binary communication system, considering an additive gaussian attack model. When compared to others results, we observe that the proposed performance lower bound is more accurate and general. New M-ary unidimensional and multidimensional Spread Spectrum based modulation techniques are introduced, including their improved forms. The performances of the proposed techniques are determined, and the performance lower bounds for the corresponding techniques classes are determined as well.