The End of screeners! Watermarked videos!

**jetje** · 11-01-2004, 09:15 AM

Philips’ technology

The innovative watermarking solution from Philips…

Can't be erased or overwritten
Robust and completely unaffected by common audio or video processing operations
Survives broadcast chains and over-the-air transmission
Open system with unique 'secret key' mechanism
Exceptional low false positive, and false negative rate
Combines enormous versatility with ease of installation, integration and operation
Wide range of applications, including copyright control and broadcast monitoring
Commercially deployed in various markets

Philips' Watermarking is a new, innovative watermarking solution that will offer major benefits to content owners, producers, post-production houses and broadcasters throughout the world. The technology, available in both software and hardware implementations, is based on modulating the video or audio signal with a noise pattern embedded using a secret 'key'. As the noise signal has very low energy and continuously adapts to the content, the watermark is imperceptible and can only be detected and decoded using the secret key. Without this key it's virtually impossible to detect the presence of the watermark, and any attempt to destroy or remove it will also ruin the quality of the material in which it's embedded.

Philips' watermark technology is also so versatile that multiple watermarks can be added to the same signal using different keys at the same time or at different stages in the production/broadcast chain without interfering with each other.

The Philips watermark introduces no noticeable loss of video quality. It also has a high degree of built-in redundancy which means it can survive, for instance, repeated recording on standard consumer VHS and DVD recorders. Philips' Watermarking technology is also unique in its robustness against all common video-processing operations normally found in studios and in transmission paths, including:

analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversion
PAL/NTSC coding and decoding
noise reduction
MPEG compression/decompression
50/60-Hz conversion
shifting, cropping, scaling, rotating, flipping and shearing
Survives conversion into highly compressed formats like DivX and WMV

Applications for Video Watermarking
The Philips Video Watermarking system can be easily integrated into production and post-production setups for a wide range of copyright verification and monitoring applications including forensic tracking of distributed video content and broadcasting applications like copyright protection, mastering, remote triggering and content identification and archiving.

Watermark embedding using the secret 'key'
During watermark embedding, which is encoded using a secret key, the format and size of the original signal remains unchanged. Embedding requires no additional bandwidth and doesn't use the vertical and horizontal blanking intervals. The extra data is added by applying very small modifications to the pixel intensities in the active video part. However, this is done in such a way that the changes are imperceptible to the eye so the end-user notices no change in picture quality.

Watermark decoding
Using sophisticated digital signal processing algorithms, the additional data can be recovered by the watermark detector, even after extensive signal processing operations. The watermark detector needs the secret key of the watermark embedder to make detection possible. For this reason, it's practically impossible for anyone who doesn't have access to this key to remove the watermark without causing severe picture quality degradation.

With the Philips watermark embedder, extra information containing, for example, the identity of the content owner and even of individual recipients of the content can be inserted into the digital video signal to uniquely identify it and guard against video piracy.

Software implementation
The software embedder component works directly on MPEG-2 video elementary streams or transport streams at the time of production or distribution and is able to embed at a speed of 4x real-time. The software detection component is able to detect embedded watermarks directly on content formats that are popular for pirated content.

Hardware implementation
The hardware implementation is specifically geared towards embedding and detecting watermarks in master content and works directly on SDI baseband. It’s available as a separate product called Watercast™ which is deployed globally by Teletrax™.

Source

**asmithz** · 11-01-2004, 09:29 AM

So its like the dot thing, but give more info? Or a camera picks up a water mark in the mage witch prevents piracy?

**jetje** · 11-01-2004, 09:48 AM

It seems it will be first used for all viewing examples that will be sent for the upcoming OSCARS. Every single copy has an individual sn/. So they will be able to track down leaked copies to the source :?.