Facilitating Watermark Insertion by Preprocessing Media
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Facilitating Watermark Insertion by Preprocessing Media Ingemar J. Cox Departments of Computer Science and Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University College London, Adastral Park Postgraduate Campus, Ross Building, Martlesham Heath, Ipswish, Suffolk IP5 3RE, UK Email: [email protected]
Matt L. Miller NEC Research Institute, 4 Independence Way, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA Email: [email protected] Received 5 May 2003; Revised 17 January 2004 There are several watermarking applications that require the deployment of a very large number of watermark embedders. These applications often have severe budgetary constraints that limit the computation resources that are available. Under these circumstances, only simple embedding algorithms can be deployed, which have limited performance. In order to improve performance, we propose preprocessing the original media. It is envisaged that this preprocessing occurs during content creation and has no budgetary or computational constraints. Preprocessing combined with simple embedding creates a watermarked Work, the performance of which exceeds that of simple embedding alone. However, this performance improvement is obtained without any increase in the computational complexity of the embedder. Rather, the additional computational burden is shifted to the preprocessing stage. A simple example of this procedure is described and experimental results confirm our assertions. Keywords and phrases: digital watermarking, preprocessing, digital rights management, copy control.
1. INTRODUCTION There are a number of applications of watermarking in which it is necessary to deploy a very large number of watermark embedders. In such situations, economic constraints are often severe and constrain the computational resources that are available for embedding. Unfortunately, high-performance—as measured by effectiveness, fidelity, and robustness—watermark embedders commonly require very substantial computational resources, especially when perceptual modeling [1, 2], informed coding [3, 4, 5],1 and/or informed embedding [6] are utilized. We address this dilemma by proposing a two-stage procedure in which a substantial fraction of the computational workload is performed as a preprocessing step on the media prior to its release to the general public. This preprocessing step is designed to permit, at a later time, subsequent watermark embedding based on computationally simple algorithms that are very economic. Our solution is appropriate in situations where content can be modified before it reaches the watermark embedders. Section 2 discusses two examples where this is common. The 1 Note that the term “preprocessing” as used in [4] differs from our usage here.
first example uses watermarks for transaction tracking (also known as fingerprinting) during consumer playback of copyrighted material. Here, each player embeds a unique watermark into everything it plays. The watermarks may be used to identify the source of any content that is subsequently distributed illegally. The second example uses watermar
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