Dream Place
Protecting multimedia content by digital watermarking
Shan He and Jeffrey Bloom
A joint coding and embedding strategy can enhance the security of electronic media against illegal copying and redistribution.
15 December 2008, SPIE Newsroom. DOI: 10.1117/2.1200811.1341
The advance of networking and digital-signal processing, along with the emergence of peer-to-peer technology, has made content piracy a major problem for copyright holders. Government agencies also face the challenge of protecting highly classified information from unauthorized redistribution. Cryptography can provide piracy protection during the transmission process, but when content is received and decrypted for display it can be illegally copied and redistributed.
Digital watermarking is a promising technology that can provide lifetime protection by adding any traces of piracy to the content. Watermarks can represent information, such as the ID of the recipient and the time and place of delivery, which are transparently embedded into the content, by slightly changing the pixel values of the video frame, for example. This information can later be extracted from an unauthorized copy to identify the source of the leak. Unfortunately, current watermarking schemes are vulnerable to a type of attack, called a collusion attack, launched by a group of users with different copies of the same content.
Our research focuses on designing watermarking schemes that can resist collusion attacks. One branch of our work aims to construct code based on abstract assumptions about the embedding layer.1 Another is embedding-focused and does not explore code structures.2 Our study shows that the code-based strategy has the advantage of low computational complexity, but the embedding-based scheme holds the benefit of high collusion resistance, which is measured by the number of colluders that can be caught within a certain probability of detection. We describe a design that considers both coding and embedding layers to
Shan He and Jeffrey Bloom
A joint coding and embedding strategy can enhance the security of electronic media against illegal copying and redistribution.
15 December 2008, SPIE Newsroom. DOI: 10.1117/2.1200811.1341
The advance of networking and digital-signal processing, along with the emergence of peer-to-peer technology, has made content piracy a major problem for copyright holders. Government agencies also face the challenge of protecting highly classified information from unauthorized redistribution. Cryptography can provide piracy protection during the transmission process, but when content is received and decrypted for display it can be illegally copied and redistributed.
Digital watermarking is a promising technology that can provide lifetime protection by adding any traces of piracy to the content. Watermarks can represent information, such as the ID of the recipient and the time and place of delivery, which are transparently embedded into the content, by slightly changing the pixel values of the video frame, for example. This information can later be extracted from an unauthorized copy to identify the source of the leak. Unfortunately, current watermarking schemes are vulnerable to a type of attack, called a collusion attack, launched by a group of users with different copies of the same content.
Our research focuses on designing watermarking schemes that can resist collusion attacks. One branch of our work aims to construct code based on abstract assumptions about the embedding layer.1 Another is embedding-focused and does not explore code structures.2 Our study shows that the code-based strategy has the advantage of low computational complexity, but the embedding-based scheme holds the benefit of high collusion resistance, which is measured by the number of colluders that can be caught within a certain probability of detection. We describe a design that considers both coding and embedding layers to