Watermarking of streaming video for finger-printing applications

The rapid expansion of e-commerce and e-entertainment applications over the Internet has dramatically increased the need for copyright protection of multimedia intellectual property. Digital multimedia watermarking, defined as unperceivably embedding a secret digital code into the perceptual multimedia content, has been proposed as a major component of future copyright protection systems. Besides carrying ownership information, the embedded watermark can be made to carry client/transaction information so as to facilitate tracing of illegal re-distribution. Such form of "personalised watermarking" is also called "finger-printing". In this paper, we propose a real-time watermarking paradigm for finger-printing streaming videos over the Internet or a private video-on-demand network. Our paradigm is based on a 3-tier architecture which runs a proxy server in between the video server and the client\´s video player. We adopt the proxy approach as we do not wish to modify the video server/player. The proxy server intercepts the client\´s request and the video data transmitted by the server, embeds a watermark into the video data based on the client/transaction information