Spread spectrum-based video watermarking algorithms for copyright protection

Merged with duplicate record 10026.1/2263 on 14.03.2017 by CS (TIS)Digital technologies know an unprecedented expansion in the last years. The consumer can now benefit from hardware and software which was considered state-of-the-art several years ago. The advantages offered by the digital technologies are major but the same digital technology opens the door for unlimited piracy. Copying an analogue VCR tape was certainly possible and relatively easy, in spite of various forms of protection, but due to the analogue environment, the subsequent copies had an inherent loss in quality. This was a natural way of limiting the multiple copying of a video material. With digital technology, this barrier disappears, being possible to make as many copies as desired, without any loss in quality whatsoever. Digital watermarking is one of the best available tools for fighting this threat. The aim of the present work was to develop a digital watermarking system compliant with the recommendations drawn by the EBU, for video broadcast monitoring. Since the watermark can be inserted in either spatial domain or transform domain, this aspect was investigated and led to the conclusion that wavelet transform is one of the best solutions available. Since watermarking is not an easy task, especially considering the robustness under various attacks several techniques were employed in order to increase the capacity/robustness of the system: spread-spectrum and modulation techniques to cast the watermark, powerful error correction to protect the mark, human visual models to insert a robust mark and to ensure its invisibility. The combination of these methods led to a major improvement, but yet the system wasn't robust to several important geometrical attacks. In order to achieve this last milestone, the system uses two distinct watermarks: a spatial domain reference watermark and the main watermark embedded in the wavelet domain. By using this reference watermark and techniques specific to image registration, the system is able to determine the parameters of the attack and revert it. Once the attack was reverted, the main watermark is recovered. The final result is a high capacity, blind DWr-based video watermarking system, robust to a wide range of attacks.BBC Research & Developmen

Frame Permutation Quantization

Frame permutation quantization (FPQ) is a new vector quantization technique using finite frames. In FPQ, a vector is encoded using a permutation source code to quantize its frame expansion. This means that the encoding is a partial ordering of the frame expansion coefficients. Compared to ordinary permutation source coding, FPQ produces a greater number of possible quantization rates and a higher maximum rate. Various representations for the partitions induced by FPQ are presented, and reconstruction algorithms based on linear programming, quadratic programming, and recursive orthogonal projection are derived. Implementations of the linear and quadratic programming algorithms for uniform and Gaussian sources show performance improvements over entropy-constrained scalar quantization for certain combinations of vector dimension and coding rate. Monte Carlo evaluation of the recursive algorithm shows that mean-squared error (MSE) decays as 1/M^4 for an M-element frame, which is consistent with previous results on optimal decay of MSE. Reconstruction using the canonical dual frame is also studied, and several results relate properties of the analysis frame to whether linear reconstruction techniques provide consistent reconstructions.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figures; detailed added to proof of Theorem 4.3 and a few minor correction

Constructions of Rank Modulation Codes

Rank modulation is a way of encoding information to correct errors in flash memory devices as well as impulse noise in transmission lines. Modeling rank modulation involves construction of packings of the space of permutations equipped with the Kendall tau distance. We present several general constructions of codes in permutations that cover a broad range of code parameters. In particular, we show a number of ways in which conventional error-correcting codes can be modified to correct errors in the Kendall space. Codes that we construct afford simple encoding and decoding algorithms of essentially the same complexity as required to correct errors in the Hamming metric. For instance, from binary BCH codes we obtain codes correcting $t$ Kendall errors in $n$ memory cells that support the order of $n!/(\log_2n!)^t$ messages, for any constant $t= 1,2,...$ We also construct families of codes that correct a number of errors that grows with $n$ at varying rates, from $\Theta(n)$ to $\Theta(n^{2})$. One of our constructions gives rise to a family of rank modulation codes for which the trade-off between the number of messages and the number of correctable Kendall errors approaches the optimal scaling rate. Finally, we list a number of possibilities for constructing codes of finite length, and give examples of rank modulation codes with specific parameters.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Performance of generalized BCH codes over GF(qs)

Due to the character of the original source materials and the nature of batch digitization, quality control issues may be present in this document. Please report any quality issues you encounter to [email protected], referencing the URI of the item.Includes bibliographical references: p. 44-45.Issued also on microfiche from Lange Micrographics.Not availabl