A constructive and unifying framework for zero-bit watermarking

In the watermark detection scenario, also known as zero-bit watermarking, a watermark, carrying no hidden message, is inserted in content. The watermark detector checks for the presence of this particular weak signal in content. The article looks at this problem from a classical detection theory point of view, but with side information enabled at the embedding side. This means that the watermark signal is a function of the host content. Our study is twofold. The first step is to design the best embedding function for a given detection function, and the best detection function for a given embedding function. This yields two conditions, which are mixed into one `fundamental' partial differential equation. It appears that many famous watermarking schemes are indeed solution to this `fundamental' equation. This study thus gives birth to a constructive framework unifying solutions, so far perceived as very different.Comment: submitted to IEEE Trans. on Information Forensics and Securit

Towards joint decoding of binary Tardos fingerprinting codes

The class of joint decoder of probabilistic fingerprinting codes is of utmost importance in theoretical papers to establish the concept of fingerprint capacity. However, no implementation supporting a large user base is known to date. This article presents an iterative decoder which is, as far as we are aware of, the first practical attempt towards joint decoding. The discriminative feature of the scores benefits on one hand from the side-information of previously accused users, and on the other hand, from recently introduced universal linear decoders for compound channels. Neither the code construction nor the decoder make precise assumptions about the collusion (size or strategy). The extension to incorporate soft outputs from the watermarking layer is straightforward. An extensive experimental work benchmarks the very good performance and offers a clear comparison with previous state-of-the-art decoders.Comment: submitted to IEEE Trans. on Information Forensics and Security. - typos corrected, one new plot, references added about ECC based fingerprinting code

Worst case attacks against binary probabilistic traitor tracing codes

An insightful view into the design of traitor tracing codes should necessarily consider the worst case attacks that the colluders can lead. This paper takes an information-theoretic point of view where the worst case attack is defined as the collusion strategy minimizing the achievable rate of the traitor tracing code. Two different decoders are envisaged, the joint decoder and the simple decoder, as recently defined by P. Moulin \cite{Moulin08universal}. Several classes of colluders are defined with increasing power. The worst case attack is derived for each class and each decoder when applied to Tardos' codes and a probabilistic version of the Boneh-Shaw construction. This contextual study gives the real rates achievable by the binary probabilistic traitor tracing codes. Attacks usually considered in literature, such as majority or minority votes, are indeed largely suboptimal. This article also shows the utmost importance of the time-sharing concept in a probabilistic codes.Comment: submitted to IEEE Trans. on Information Forensics and Securit

Orientation covariant aggregation of local descriptors with embeddings

Image search systems based on local descriptors typically achieve orientation invariance by aligning the patches on their dominant orientations. Albeit successful, this choice introduces too much invariance because it does not guarantee that the patches are rotated consistently. This paper introduces an aggregation strategy of local descriptors that achieves this covariance property by jointly encoding the angle in the aggregation stage in a continuous manner. It is combined with an efficient monomial embedding to provide a codebook-free method to aggregate local descriptors into a single vector representation. Our strategy is also compatible and employed with several popular encoding methods, in particular bag-of-words, VLAD and the Fisher vector. Our geometric-aware aggregation strategy is effective for image search, as shown by experiments performed on standard benchmarks for image and particular object retrieval, namely Holidays and Oxford buildings.Comment: European Conference on Computer Vision (2014

An Asymmetric Public Detection Watermarking Technique

International audienceThe new watermarking technique presented in this paper is an example of an asymmetric public detection scheme

Robustness of an asymmetric technique

Asymmetric schemes belong to second generation of watermarking. Whereas their need and advantage are well understood, many doubts have been raised about their robustness. According to a method presented in [1], a very robust symmetric technique is derived into an asymmetric scheme. Tests show that it is as robust as the symmetric version. Yet, asymmetric schemes undergo malicious attacks that confuse the detection process. Tests reveal that the quality loss due to these malicious attacks is too important for the signal to be used after the attack

BLIND DECODER FOR BINARY PROBABILISTIC TRAITOR TRACING CODES

This paper presents a new decoder for probabilistic binary traitor tracing codes which is based on classical hypothesis testing and estimation theory. This new decoder is blind, in the sense of ignoring a priori the collusion attack it is facing. It basically performs a joint estimation of the collusion channel and the probability that each user takes part in the collusion. The experimental results shown in the paper have been obtained with the classical Tardos code, although the proposed decoder works with arbitrary probabilistic binary codes. Another remarkable advantage of this blind decoder is its ability to successfully cope with collusion channels far more general than the classical Marking Assumption, including channels that produce erasures and random decoding errors. Index Terms — Traitor tracing, Tardos code, collusion channel estimation, likelihood ratio, optimal decoding

Watermarking security

International audienceThis chapter deals with applications where watermarking is a security primitive included in a larger system protecting the value of multimedia content. In this context, there might exist dishonest users, in the sequel so-called attackers, willing to read/overwrite hidden messages or simply to remove the watermark signal.The goal of this section is to play the role of the attacker. We analyze means to deduce information about the watermarking technique that will later ease the forgery of attacked copies. This chapter first proposes a topology of the threats in Section 6.1, introducing three different concepts: robustness, worst-case attacks, and security. Previous chapter has already discussed watermark robustness. We focus on worst-case attacks in Section 6.2, on the way to measure watermarking security in Section 6.3, and on the classical tools to break a watermarking scheme in Section 6.4. This tour of watermarking security concludes by a summary of what we know and still do not know about it (Section 6.5) and a review of oracle attacks (Section 6.6). Last, Section 6.7 deals with protocol attacks, a notion which underlines the illusion of security that a watermarking primitive might bring when not properly used in some applications

L'illusion du test par groupe

This report challenges the assumptions usually made in non-adaptive group testing. The test is usually modelled as a probabilistic mechanism prone to false positive and / or false negative errors. However, the models are still too optimistic because the performances of these non ideal tests are assumed to be independent of the size of the groups. Without this condition, the report shows that the promises of group test (a number of tests and a decoding complexity scaling as c logN) do not hold.Ce rapport de recherche présente une investigation sur les hypothèses parfois cachées en test par groupe. Pour un nombre c de malades sur une population de taille N, on dit souvent qu’il suffit de O(c logN) tests pour identifier les malades. Ce résultat est erroné dès que les performances du test s’effondrent avec la taille du groupe