Recently, we proposed a method for constructing a template for efficient temporal synchronization in video watermarking.1 Our temporal synchronization method uses a state machine key generator for producing the watermark embedded in successive frames of video. A feature extractor allows the watermark key schedule to be content dependent, increasing the difficulty of copy and ownership attacks. It was shown that efficient synchronization can be achieved by adding temporal redundancy into the key schedule. In this paper, we explore and extend the concepts of our temporal synchronization method to spatial synchronization. The key generator is used to construct the embedded watermark of non-overlapping blocks of the video, creating a tiled structure.2

In the past decade there has been an explosion in the use and distribution of digital multimedia data. PCs with Internet connections have taken homes by storm and have made the distribution of multimedia data and applications much easier and faster. Electronic commerce applications and on-line services are rapidly being developed. Even the analog audio and video equipment in the home is in the process of being replaced by their digital successors. As a result, we can see the digital mass recording devices for multimedia data enter the consumer market of today.

DVD players, and general-purpose computing devices such as personal computers. The network may receive copyrighted digital multimedia content from a number of sources. This content may be broadcast via satellite or terrestrial systems, transmitted by cable operators, or made available as prepackaged media (e.g., a digital tape or a digital video disc). Before releasing their content for distribution, the content owners may require protection by specifying access conditions. Once the content is delivered to the consumer, it moves across home the network until it reaches its destination where it is stored or displayed. A copy protection system is needed to prevent unauthorized access to bit streams in transmission from one A/V device to another or while it is in storage on magnetic or optical media. Recently, two fundamental groups of technologies, encryption and watermarking, have been identified for protecting copyrighted digital multimedia content. This paper is an overview of the work done for protecting content owners

Digital watermarking of multimedia content has become a very active research area over the last several years. A general framework for watermark embedding and detection/decoding is presented here along with a review of some of the algorithms for different media types described in the literature. We highlight some of the differences based on application such as copyright protection, authentication, tamper detection, and data hiding as well as differences in technology and system requirements for different media types such as digital images, video, audio and text.

When looked at as a communication task, the watermarking process can be split into three main steps: watermark generation and embedding (information transmission), possible attacks (transmission through the channel), and watermark retrieval (information decoding at the receiver side). In this article we review the main issues in watermark generation and embedding. By focusing on the case of image watermarking, we first discuss the choice of the image features the watermark is superimposed to. Then wc consider watermark generation and the rule used to insert the watermark within the host features. By adopting again a communication perspective, some useful hints are given on the way the watermark should be shaped and inserted within the host document for increased robustness against attacks. Given that invisibility is one of the main requirements a watermark must satisfy, the way psycho-visual notions can be used to effectively hide the watermark within an image is carefully rcviewed in the second part of the article. Rather than insisting on the mathematical aspects of each of the above issues, the main rationale behind the most commonly adopted approaches is given, as well as some illustrative examples.

Digital multimedia content is delivered to homes via the Internet, satellite, terrestrial and cable networks. Scrambling is a common approach used by conditional access systems to prevent unauthorized access to audio/ visual data. The descrambling keys are securely distributed to the receivers in the same transmission channel. Their protection is an important part of the key management problem. Although public-key cryptography provides a viable solution, alternative methods are sought for economy and emcieney. Message authentication is an important objective of information security in modern electronic distribution networks. This objective is met by providing the receiver of a message an assurance of the sender’s identity. As physical protection such as sealed envelopes is not possible for messages expressed as binary sequences, digital tools have been developed using cryptography, A major limitation of all cryp tographic methods for message authentication lies in their use of algorithms with flxed symmetric or public keys. This paper presents a key transport protocol based on secret sharing. Conditional access and message authentication are two important application areas for which the advantages of the proposed protocol are discussed. The protocol eliminates the need for a cipher, yet effectively combines the advantages of symmetric and public-key ciphers. It can be used to build a new key management scheme that allows the service providers to generate different keys for different sets of receivers, and to renew these keys in a convenient way.

With the advent of digital technologies, many new market opportunities have emerged for content owners, content distributors, and consumer electronics/information technology industries. An essential requirement for developing a thriving marketplace is the protection of copyrighted content in digital form. There are four major stages in the delivery of content to the consumer: (1) capturing on digital media, (2) packaging, (3) distribution to home networks, and (4) transfer to the final audio/visual device within the home network. Entertainment content is of particular importance as it will be in high demand for many years to come. If an end-to-end security cannot be provided in a digital market, there would be no incentive for content creation. Lack of new supplies would result in detrimental effects for all the industries involved in the delivery chain. In this paper, we present the primary means of securing the entertainment content from creation to consumption in an attempt to understand the overall complexity of the problem.

Abstract

Video streaming, or the real-time delivery of video over a data network, is the underlying technology behind many applications including video conferencing, video-on-demand, and the delivery of educational and entertainment content. In many applications, particularly ones involving entertainment content, security issues, such as conditional access and copy protection must be addressed. To resolve these security issues, techniques that include encryption and watermarking need to be developed. Since the video sequences will often be compressed using a scalable compression technique and transported over a lossy packet network using the Internet Protocol (IP), the security techniques must be compatible with the compression method and data transport and be robust to errors. In this paper, we address the issues involved in the watermarking of rate-scalable video streams delivered using a practical network. Watermarking is the embedding of a signal (the watermark) into a video stream that is imperceptible when the stream is viewed but can be detected by a watermark detector. Many watermarking techniques have been proposed for digital images and video, but the issues of streaming have not been fully investigated. A review of streaming video is presented, including scalable video compression and network transport, followed by a brief review of video watermarking and the discussion of watermarking streaming video.

We discuss in this paper the issues related to image watermarking benchmarking and scenarios based on digital rights management requirements. We show that improvements are needed in image quality evaluation, specially related to image geometrical deformation assessments, in risk evaluation related to specific delivery scenarios and in multidimensional criteria evaluation. Efficient benchmarking is still an open issue and we suggest the use of open-source Web-based evaluation systems for the collective progresses in this domain.

creators; however, the ability for anyone to make perfect copies and the ease by which those copies can be distributed also facilitate misuse, illegal copying and distribution (

Tables of factorizations of the numbers in the title, and a description of how they were factored.  Numbers of this form appear often in problems in number theory and cryptography.

While Digital Watermarking has received much attention within the academic community and private sector in recent years, it is still a relatively young technology. As such, there are few accepted tools and metrics that can be used to validate the performance claims asserted by members of the research community and evaluate the suitability of a watermarking technique for specific applications. This lack of a universally adopted set of metrics and methods has motivated us to develop a web-based digital watermark evaluation system known as the Watermark Evaluation Testbed or WET. This system has undergone several improvements since its inception. The ultimate goal of this work has been to develop a platform, where any watermarking researcher can test not only the performance of known techniques, but also their own techniques. This goal has been reached by the latest version of the system. New tools and concepts have been designed to achieve the desired objectives. This paper describes the new features of WET. Moreover, we also summarize the development process of the entire project as well as introduce new directions for future work.

Robust watermarks are evaluated in terms of image fidelity and robustness. We extend this framework and apply reliability testing to robust watermark evaluation. Reliability is the probability that a watermarking algorithm will correctly detect or decode a watermark for a specified fidelity requirement under a given set of attacks and images. In reliability testing, a system is evaluated in terms of quality, load, capacity and performance. To measure quality that corresponds to image fidelity, we compensate for attacks to measure the fidelity of attacked watermarked images. We use the conditional mean of pixel values to compensate for valumetric attacks such as gamma correction and histogram equalization. To compensate for geometrical attacks, we use error concealment and perfect motion estimation assumption. We define capacity to be the maximum embedding strength parameter and the maximum data payload. Load is then defined to be the actual embedding strength and data payload of a watermark. To measure performance, we use bit error rate (BER) and receiver operating characteristics (ROC) and area under the curve (AUC) of the ROC curve of a watermarking algorithm for different attacks and images. We evaluate robust watermarks for various quality, loads, attacks, and images.