Development of a platform offering video copyright protection and security against illegal distribution

The distribution and playback of digital images and other multimedia products are easily and fast done. Thus, its processing in order to achieve satisfactory copyright protection is a challenging problem for the research community. Encrypting the data only offers protection as long as the data remains encrypted, since once an authorized but fraudulent user decrypts it, nothing stops him from redistributing the data without having to worry about being caught. A watermarking scheme, which embeds some owner information (mark) into host images, is regarded as a possible solution to this problem. Nevertheless, digital watermarking is not strong enough to offer protection against illegal distributors. In this environment, digital fingerprinting techniques provide a good solution to dissuade illegal copying. To make such distribution systems work securely, the embedded marks in those system must be resistant to powerful attacks such as common image processing operations, lossy image compression, geometric transforms, combination addition of random noise (errors) and/or collusion attacks. The work presented in this paper consists on the development of an empirical and portable JAVA platform where digital video (in MPEG2 format) can be protected against redistribution by dishonest users. The platform allows to verify at a practical level the strength properties of digital watermarking and fingerprinting marks. More precisely, it can be used to compare the performance of different watermarking algorithms (spread-spectrum and QIM). Moreover, it also offers the capability of embedding different digital fingerprinting codes, and verify its behaviour.