Digital cinema, a new frontier and crown jewel of digital multimedia, has the potential of revolutionizing the science, engineering and business of movie production and distribution. The advantages of digital cinema technology over traditional analog technology are numerous and profound. But without effective and enforceable copyright protection measures, digital cinema can be more susceptible to widespread piracy, which can dampen or even prevent the commercial deployment of digital cinema. In this paper we propose a novel approach of fingerprinting each individual distribution copy of a digital movie for the purpose of tracing pirated copies back to their source. The proposed fingerprinting technique presents a fundamental departure from the traditional digital watermarking/fingerprinting techniques. Its novelty and uniqueness lie in a so-called semantic or subjective transparency property. The fingerprints are created by editing those visual and audio attributes that can be modified with semantic and subjective transparency to the audience. Semantically-transparent fingerprinting or watermarking is the most robust kind among all existing watermarking techniques, because it is content-based not sample-based, and semantically-recoverable not statistically-recoverable.

Date Published: 20 June 2003
PDF: 6 pages
Proc. SPIE 5020, Security and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents V, (20 June 2003); doi: 10.1117/12.479730

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 5020:
Security and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents V
Edward J. Delp III; Ping Wah Wong, Editor(s)