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Research >> Digital Video Watermarking
DescriptionThe ease by which anyone can distribute copies of digital content facilitates piracy, which results in significant losses for the movie industry. Watermarking can be used to either identify the recording device or enable access control. In the latter case, the watermark embedded in the video sequence provides information on whether video players are authorized to display the content or not. This project focuses on developing a new highly robust watermarking scheme designed specifically for access control applications. The development of such a scheme will solve the problem that content owners constantly face when handheld video cameras are used to record feature films played in poorly supervised movie theaters. The illegally recorded video sequences are compressed and sold as pirated DVDs. These DVDs do not provide any revenues to the creators of the content. Furthermore, potential revenues may be lost since people might choose to watch the pirated copies instead of going to the theaters. One objective is to design a watermarking scheme that is part of the theater projection devices, with the watermark identifying the theater location. This approach would allow Hollywood to identify the poorly supervised theater and remove its license. Another objective is to design a watermarking scheme that enables DVD players to detect a watermark that was inserted in the copy of a movie - which was only intended for release in cinemas - and not play the illegal content.
Our projects:
Watermarking for Access Control: We have introduced a watermarking
scheme that discourages theater camcorder piracy through the
enforcement of playback control. In this method, the video is
watermarked so that its display is not permitted if a compliant video
player detects the watermark. A watermark that is robust to geometric
distortions (rotation, scaling, cropping) and lossy compression is
required in order to block access to media content that has been
re-recorded with a camera inside a movie theater. We introduce a new
video watermarking algorithm for playback control that takes advantage
of the properties of the dual-tree complex wavelet transform. This
transform offers the advantages of the regular and the complex
wavelets (perfect reconstruction, shift invariance, and good
directional selectivity). Our method relies on these characteristics
to create a watermark that is robust to geometric distortions and
lossy compression. The proposed scheme is simple to implement and
outperforms comparable methods when tested against geometric
distortions.
High-Capacity Watermarking: We propose a straightforward yet powerful AQIM-based watermarking scheme that considers the statistical behavior of the region where a message bit is to be embedded before settling on the size of the quantization step. Experimental results show that, for the same watermark capacity and image fidelity parameters, our proposed region-specific scheme exhibits a lower bit error rate than the regular AQIM approach.
Selected Publications:
- L. Coria, P. Nasiopoulos and R. K. Ward, “A Region-Specific QIM-Based Watermarking Scheme for Digital Images”, 6 proc. pages, IEEE International Symposium on Broadband Multimedia Systems and Broadcasting, Spain, May 2009.
- L. Coria, P. Nasiopoulos, R. K. Ward and M. Pickering, " An Access Control Video Watermarking Method that is Robust to Geometric Distortions “, Journal of Information Assurance and Security, Vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 266 – 274, December 2008.
- L. Coria, M. Pickering, P. Nasiopoulos and R. K. Ward, "A Video Watermarking Scheme Based on the Dual-Tree Complex Wavelet Transform“, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 466 – 474, September 2008.
- L. Coria, M. Pickering and P. Nasiopoulos, "An Access Control Video Watermarking Method that is Robust to Geometric Distrortions," IEEE 2nd International Conference on Digital Information Management (ICDM) 2007, Vol. 1, pp. 460 - 465, Lion, France, October 2007.
- M. Pickering, L. Coria and P. Nasiopoulos, “A Novel Blind Video Watermarking Scheme for Access Control Using Complex Wavelets,” IEEE Conference on Consumer Electronics (ICCE) 2007, pp. 1-2, Las Vegas, NV, January 2007.
- L. Coria, P. Nasiopoulos and R. K. Ward, “A Robust Content-Dependent Algorithm for Video Watermarking”, 6th ACM Workshop on Digital Rights Management, pp. 97-101, Alexandria, VA, October 30, 2006.
- L. Coria, P. Nasiopoulos and R. K. Ward, “A robust watermarking scheme based on informed coding and informed embedding”, IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) 2005, Vol. 1, pp. 681 – 684, Genova, September 2005.
- P. Nasiopoulos, L. Coria, A. Golikeri, H. Mansour, “An Improved Error Concealment Algorithm for Intar-frames in H.264/AVC”, IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS) 2005, Vol. 1, pp. 320 - 323, Kobe, Japan, May 2005.