Sparse Signal Decomposition Techniques For Multimedia Fingerprinting

This dissertation focuses on digital multimedia content protection from the copyright point of view. Several approaches aiming to resolve the challenge to some extent in the emerging area of multimedia protection were proposed and studied. This study proposes an approach to secure the authorized media sharing in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks. The P2P networks was initially designed for bandwidth saving, but its file sharing property was later on put to use for pirate. This situation has not been improved effectively until now. The approach aims to embed an unique-mark (fingerprint) into each authorized copy in the P2P networks so that it can be used to track the pirate initiator. This study also proposes another scheme for protecting the ownership of digital media files that have been circulated without copyright mark embedded. To protect this type of files, the ownership of each file needs to be stored associated with its meta-data (such as the ownership, title and artist) and can be identified correctly later on. Since the size and the number of the media files to be stored are extremely large, the mini versions (fingerprints) of the files become necessary to be derived. The common criteria of designing these two approaches are to ensure the fingerprint is compact, robust, discriminative, and ease of computation. To well balance the criteria, the sparse decomposition techniques play a very important role. The results of the tests under various distortions show the proposed fingerprinting schemes are very promising for real applications.

Sparse Signal Decomposition Techniques For Multimedia Fingerprinting

This dissertation focuses on digital multimedia content protection from the copyright point of view. Several approaches aiming to resolve the challenge to some extent in the emerging area of multimedia protection were proposed and studied. This study proposes an approach to secure the authorized media sharing in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks. The P2P networks was initially designed for bandwidth saving, but its file sharing property was later on put to use for pirate. This situation has not been improved effectively until now. The approach aims to embed an unique-mark (fingerprint) into each authorized copy in the P2P networks so that it can be used to track the pirate initiator. This study also proposes another scheme for protecting the ownership of digital media files that have been circulated without copyright mark embedded. To protect this type of files, the ownership of each file needs to be stored associated with its meta-data (such as the ownership, title and artist) and can be identified correctly later on. Since the size and the number of the media files to be stored are extremely large, the mini versions (fingerprints) of the files become necessary to be derived. The common criteria of designing these two approaches are to ensure the fingerprint is compact, robust, discriminative, and ease of computation. To well balance the criteria, the sparse decomposition techniques play a very important role. The results of the tests under various distortions show the proposed fingerprinting schemes are very promising for real applications.

Blockchain-Based Multimedia Content Protection: Review and Open Challenges

In this paper, we provide a holistic survey of multimedia content protection applications in which blockchain technology is being used. A taxonomy is developed to classify these applications with reference to the technical aspects of blockchain technology, content protection techniques, namely, encryption, digital rights management, digital watermarking and fingerprinting (or transaction tracking), and performance criteria. The study of the literature reveals that there is currently no complete and systematic taxonomy dedicated to blockchain-based copyright protection applications. Moreover, the number of successfully developed blockchain-based content protection systems is very low. This points towards a research gap. To fill this gap, we propose a taxonomy that integrates technical aspects and application knowledge and can guide the researchers towards the development of blockchain-based multimedia copyright protection systems. Furthermore, the paper discusses some technical challenges and outlines future research directions.

Cloud-Based Multimedia Content Protection System

We propose a new design for large-scale multimedia content protection systems. Our design leverages cloud infrastructures to provide cost efficiency, rapid deployment, scalability, and elasticity to accommodate varying workloads. The proposed system can be used to protect different multimedia content types, including videos, images, audio clips, songs, and music clips. The system can be deployed on private and/or public clouds. Our system has two novel components: (i) method to create signatures of videos, and (ii) distributed matching engine for multimedia objects. The signature method creates robust and representative signatures of videos that capture the depth signals in these videos and it is computationally efficient to compute and compare as well as it requires small storage. The distributed matching engine achieves high scalability and it is designed to support different multimedia objects. We implemented the proposed system and deployed it on two clouds: Amazon cloud and our private cloud. Our experiments with more than 11,000 videos and 1 million images show the high accuracy and scalability of the proposed system. In addition, we compared our system to the protection system used by YouTube and our results show that the YouTube protection system fails to detect most copies of videos, while our system detects more than 98% of them.

A Survey on Multimedia Content Protection Mechanisms

Cloud computing has emerged to influence multimedia content providers like Disney to render their multimedia services. When content providers use the public cloud, there are chances to have pirated copies further leading to a loss in revenues. At the same time, technological advancements regarding content recording and hosting made it easy to duplicate genuine multimedia objects. This problem has increased with increased usage of a cloud platform for rendering multimedia content to users across the globe. Therefore it is essential to have mechanisms to detect video copy, discover copyright infringement of multimedia content and protect the interests of genuine content providers. It is a challenging and computationally expensive problem to be addressed considering the exponential growth of multimedia content over the internet. In this paper, we surveyed multimedia-content protection mechanisms which throw light on different kinds of multimedia, multimedia content modification methods, and techniques to protect intellectual property from abuse and copyright infringement. It also focuses on challenges involved in protecting multimedia content and the research gaps in the area of cloud-based multimedia content protection.

Performance Evaluation of watermarking Schemes to Decide Meaningful Number of Shares

<p>With the growth in digital world, it is becoming more important to find a method to<br />protect the security of digital media. An image watermarking model based on visual secret<br />sharing (VSS) is proposed for protection of ownership. In the embedding phase, the<br />watermark is first divided by VSS into two parts, a hiding watermark and a secret watermark.<br />Then only the hiding watermark is embedded into the original image and the secret<br />watermark is reserved for watermark extracting by the owner. In the extracting phase, the<br />hiding watermark is extracted from the watermarked image first and then directly<br />superimposed on the secret watermark to recover the watermark information. Digital<br />watermarking has been proposed as a possible brick of such protection systems. However,<br />application of watermarking for multimedia content protection in realistic scenarios poses<br />several security issues.<br />A digital watermarking technique is used to generate meaningful shares. The secret image<br />shares are watermarked with different cover images and are transmitted. At the receiving side,<br />the cover images are extracted from the shares and stacked one by one which reveals the secret<br />image progressively. Digital watermarking using visual cryptography provides improved security<br />for encrypting secret images.</p>