Personal rights management (PRM) : enabling privacy rights in digital online media content

With ubiquitous use of digital camera devices, especially in mobile phones, privacy is no longer threatened by governments and companies only. The new technology creates a new threat by ordinary people, who now have the means to take and distribute pictures of one’s face at no risk and little cost in any situation in public and private spaces. Fast distribution via web based photo albums, online communities and web pages expose an individual’s private life to the public in unpreceeded ways. Social and legal measures are increasingly taken to deal with this problem. In practice however, they lack efficiency, as they are hard to enforce in practice. In this paper, we discuss a supportive infrastructure aiming for the distribution channel; as soon as the picture is publicly available, the exposed individual has a chance to find it and take proper action.Wir stellen ein System zur Wahrnehmung des Rechts am eigenen Bild bei der Veröffentlichung digitaler Fotos, zum Beispiel von Handykameras, im Internet vor. Zur Entdeckung der Veröffentlichung schlagen wir ein Watermarking-Verfahren vor, welches das Auffinden der Bilder durch die potentiell abgebildeten Personen ermöglicht, ohne die Rechte des Fotografen einzuschränken

When images work faster than words: The integration of content-based image retrieval with the Northumbria Watermark Archive

Information on the manufacture, history, provenance, identification, care and conservation of paper-based artwork/objects is disparate and not always readily available. The Northumbria Watermark Archive will incorporate such material into a database, which will be made freely available on the Internet providing an invaluable resource for conservation, research and education. The efficiency of a database is highly dependant on its search mechanism. Text based mechanisms are frequently ineffective when a range of descriptive terminologies might be used i.e. when describing images or translating from foreign languages. In such cases a Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) system can be more effective. Watermarks provide paper with unique visual identification characteristics and have been used to provide a point of entry to the archive that is more efficient and effective than a text based search mechanism. The research carried out has the potential to be applied to any numerically large collection of images with distinctive features of colour, shape or texture i.e. coins, architectural features, picture frame profiles, hallmarks, Japanese artists stamps etc. Although the establishment of an electronic archive incorporating a CBIR system can undoubtedly improve access to large collections of images and related data, the development is rarely trouble free. This paper discusses some of the issues that must be considered i.e. collaboration between disciplines; project management; copying and digitising objects; content based image retrieval; the Northumbria Watermark Archive; the use of standardised terminology within a database as well as copyright issues

Watermarking technique for wireless multimedia sensor networks: A state of the art

Wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs) are an emerging type of sensor network which contain sensor nodes equipped with microphones, cameras, and other sensors that produce multimedia content. These networks have the potential to enable a large class of applications ranging from military to modern healthcare. Multimedia nodes are susceptible to various types of attack, such as cropping, compression, or even physical capture and sensor replacement. Hence, security becomes an important issue in WMSNs. However, given the fact that sensors are resource constrained, the traditional intensive security algorithms are not well suited for WMSNs. This makes the traditional security techniques, based on data encryption, not very suitable for WMSNs. Watermarking techniques are usually computationally lightweight and do not require much memory resources. These techniques are being considered as an attractive alternative to the traditional techniques, because of their light resource requirements. The objective of this paper is to present a critical analysis of the existing state-of-the-art watermarking algorithms developed for WMSNs

Are Social Networks Watermarking Us or Are We (Unawarely) Watermarking Ourself?

In the last decade, Social Networks (SNs) have deeply changed many aspects of society, and one of the most widespread behaviours is the sharing of pictures. However, malicious users often exploit shared pictures to create fake profiles, leading to the growth of cybercrime. Thus, keeping in mind this scenario, authorship attribution and verification through image watermarking techniques are becoming more and more important. In this paper, we firstly investigate how thirteen of the most popular SNs treat uploaded pictures in order to identify a possible implementation of image watermarking techniques by respective SNs. Second, we test the robustness of several image watermarking algorithms on these thirteen SNs. Finally, we verify whether a method based on the Photo-Response Non-Uniformity (PRNU) technique, which is usually used in digital forensic or image forgery detection activities, can be successfully used as a watermarking approach for authorship attribution and verification of pictures on SNs. The proposed method is sufficiently robust, in spite of the fact that pictures are often downgraded during the process of uploading to the SNs. Moreover, in comparison to conventional watermarking methods the proposed method can successfully pass through different SNs, solving related problems such as profile linking and fake profile detection. The results of our analysis on a real dataset of 8400 pictures show that the proposed method is more effective than other watermarking techniques and can help to address serious questions about privacy and security on SNs. Moreover, the proposed method paves the way for the definition of multi-factor online authentication mechanisms based on robust digital features