Intellectual property management on MPEG-4 video for hand-held device and mobile video streaming service

MPEG-4 video streaming service is being regarded as a de facto standard service for current mobile multimedia video streaming services such as video conferencing, voice over IP, and even state-of-the-art digital multimedia broadcasting technology. There have been many illegal users who have used copyrighted material without getting permission and/or paying for its use. Therefore, much attention has been paid for digital rights management (DRM) for digital media. We constructed a protection scheme for MPEG-4 video file format, which can be applied, to the video services that are exploiting the MPEG-4 standard. In this protection scheme, minimum segments of every video object plane in a MPEG-4 video file could be encrypted with a symmetric cryptography system like a DES (data encryption standard) so that people who have not received permission and/or paid to use the contents would not be able to view them. We applied this scheme to all kinds of MPEG-4 VOP (video object plane) types, that is I-, P-, and B-VOPs respectively. The prototype system was developed for proofing the feasibility of this scheme for hand-held devices and for mobile multimedia service environment. The efficiency of this scheme is reported at the end of this paper.