Copy Protection for Multimedia Data based on Labeling Techniques

Service providers are reluctant to distribute their multimedia data in digital form because of their fears for unrestricted duplication and dissemination. Therefore robust methods must be developed to protect the proprietary rights of the multimedia data owners and to realize a copy protection mechanism. In this paper the existing methods for labeling multimedia data are discussed and evaluated. A possibility is given to extend these methods towards a robust copy protection system for new mass storage devices. Some methods suitable for a copy protection method are selected and weak points are discussed. One of these methods is extended to embed a bit sequence instead of one bit in an image and to make it more resistant to lossy compression techniques. Using this method some true color images (size about 500 x 500) were labeled with about 200 bits. The label turned out to be resistant to JPEG compression, with quality parameter set up to 40% (compression rate >1:20). 1. Introduction N..