Implementing an Adaptive Behavior for Spread Spectrum Watermarking Procedures

Authors: Franco Frattolillo

Abstract:

The advances in multimedia and networking technologies have created opportunities for Internet pirates, who can easily copy multimedia contents and illegally distribute them on the Internet, thus violating the legal rights of content owners. This paper describes how a simple and well-known watermarking procedure based on a spread spectrum method and a watermark recovery by correlation can be improved to effectively and adaptively protect MPEG-2 videos distributed on the Internet. In fact, the procedure, in its simplest form, is vulnerable to a variety of attacks. However, its security and robustness have been increased, and its behavior has been made adaptive with respect to the video terminals used to open the videos and the network transactions carried out to deliver them to buyers. In fact, such an adaptive behavior enables the proposed procedure to efficiently embed watermarks, and this characteristic makes the procedure well suited to be exploited in web contexts, where watermarks usually generated from fingerprinting codes have to be inserted into the distributed videos “on the fly", i.e. during the purchase web transactions.

Keywords: Copyright protection, digital watermarking, intellectualproperty protection.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI): doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1072132

References:

[1] I. Cox, J. Bloom, and M. Miller, Digital Watermarking: Principles & Practice. Morgan Kaufman, 2001.
[2] M. Barni and F. Bartolini, "Data hiding for fighting piracy," IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 28-39, 2004.
[3] M. Wu et al., "Collusion-resistant fingerprinting for multimedia," IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 15-27, 2004.
[4] W. Trappe, M. Wu, et al., "Anti-collusion fingerprinting for multimedia," IEEE Trans. on Signal Processing, vol. 41, no. 4, pp. 1069-1087, 2003.
[5] I. Cox, J. Kilian, et al., "Secure spread spectrum watermarking for multimedia," IEEE Trans. on Signal Processing, vol. 6, no. 12, pp. 1673- 1687, 1997.
[6] C.-Y. Lin, M. Wu, J. Bloom, I. Cox, M. Miller, and Y. Lui, "Rotation, scale and translation resilient watermarking for images," IEEE Trans. on Image Processing, vol. 10, no. 5, pp. 767-782, 2001.
[7] J. Lubin, J. Bloom, and H. Cheng, "Robust, content-dependent, highfidelity watermark for tracking in digital cinema," in Electronic Imaging 2003, Security and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents, ser. SPIE Proceedings, P. W. Wong and E. J. Delp, Eds., vol. 5020, S. Jose, CA, USA, Jan. 2003, pp. 536-545.
[8] H. S. Malvar and D. A. F. Florˆencio, "Improved spread spectrum: A new modulation technique for robust watermarking," IEEE Trans. on Signal Processing, vol. 51, no. 4, pp. 898-905, 2003.
[9] B. Chen and G. Wornell, "Quantization index modulation: a class of provably good methods for digital watermarking and information embedding," IEEE Trans. on Inforormation Theory, vol. 47, no. 4, pp. 1423-1443, 2001.
[10] F. Hartung and B. Girod, "Digital watermarking of raw and compressed video," in Proc. European EOS/SPIE Symposium on Advanced Imaging and Network Technologies, Berlin, Germany, October 1996.
[11] ÔÇöÔÇö, "Digital watermarking of MPEG-2 coded video in the bitstream domain," in Procs of the Int-l Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, vol. 4, Munich, Germany, 1997, pp. 2621-2624.
[12] F. Hartung and M. Kutter, "Multimedia watermarking techniques," Procs of the IEEE, vol. 87, no. 7, pp. 1079-1107, 1999.
[13] D. Boneh and J. Shaw, "Collusion-secure fingerprinting for digital data," IEEE Trans. on Information Theory, vol. 44, no. 9, pp. 1897-1905, 1998.
[14] Z. Lei and N. D. Georganas, "Rate adaptation transcoding for precoded video streams," in Procs of the 10th ACM Int-l Conference on Multimedia, Juan-les-Pins, France, 2002, pp. 127-136.
[15] F. Hartung, J. Su, and B. Girod, "Spread spectrum watermarking: Malicious attacks and counterattacks," in Electronic Imaging 1999, Security and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents, ser. SPIE Proceedings, vol. 3657, S. Jose, CA, USA, Jan. 1999, pp. 147-158.
[16] Y. Wang, J. Ostermann, and Y. Zhang, Video Processing and Communications. Prentice Hall, 2002.