Toward Practical Joint Decoding of Binary Tardos Fingerprinting Codes

The class of joint decoder in 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 paper presents an iterative decoder which is the first attempt toward practical large-scale joint decoding. The discriminative feature of the scores benefits on one hand from the side-information of previously found users, and on the other hand, from recently introduced universal linear decoders for compound channels. Neither the code construction nor the decoder makes assumptions about the collusion size and strategy, provided it is a memoryless and fair attack. 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.