Watermarking of streaming video for finger-printing applications

The rapid expansion of e-commerce and e-entertainment applications over the Internet has dramatically increased the need for copyright protection of multimedia intellectual property. Digital multimedia watermarking, defined as imperceivably embedding a secret digital code into the perceptual multimedia content, has been proposed as a major component of future copyright protection systems. Besides carrying ownership information, the embedded watermark can be made to carry client/transaction information so as to facilitate tracing of illegal re-distribution. Such form of "personalised watermarking" is also called "finger-printing". In this paper, we propose a real-time watermarking paradigm for finger-printing streaming videos over the Internet or a private video-on-demand network. Our paradigm is based on a 3-tier architecture which runs a proxy server in between the video server and the client's video player. We adopt the proxy approach as we do not wish to modify the video server/player. The proxy server intercepts the client's request and the video data transmitted by the server, embeds a watermark into the video data based on the client/transaction information, and re-encapsulate the video data within the transport packets. Based on this paradigm, we have developed a prototype capable of finger-printing MPEG4 streaming videos using standard video streaming protocols such as RTSP/RTCP/RTP. Pertinent design/implementation issues and results of this work will be discussed.