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Philips excited about its video watermarking technology

Fighting piracy has become somewhat of an industry of its own in the last several years. At the forefront of everything stands Philips, a hardware manufacturing house that boasts some of the most widely supported technology anywhere. This week, Philips launches what it calls the VTrack, a visual-based watermarking technology that will help analysts and law enforcements trace back stolen or illegally distributed material.

The goal for Philips is to help publishers protect content that is played over PayTV. VTrack utilizes watermarking technology in an unobtrusive manner, allowing users to fully enjoy their movies but at the same time providing a mechanism for piracy tracing.

Andrew G. Setos, president of engineering at Fox Group, stated that his company as well as others was excited to hear that Philips had delivered a promising technology for broadcasters. "We are thrilled that Philips has entered the market with a session based, forensic watermark system. Forensic watermarks have already shown their merit in PayTV applications and help our premium content from unauthorized redistribution by counterfeiters and others," said Setos.

According to Philips, VTrack watermarks cannot be separated from the content or modified. Philips is very confident with VTrack, indicating that even after quality reduction, scaling, cropping or compression the watermark will still be intact.

Protecting video content is not new to Philips. The company last launched a controversial technology that it said will prevent TV watchers from skipping commercials. After an uproar by the online community, Philips responded by saying that the technology can be disabled or enabled by the consumer -- making the feature rather pointless to begin with.

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By therealnickdanger on 4/13/2007 3:48:56 PM , Rating: 3
Yeah, anti-piracy tools certainly get more innovative, but how many days before VTrack is released will it be before a hack is released?




By Chadder007 on 4/13/2007 4:40:09 PM , Rating: 5
Too late....it has already been cracked. :D


By feelingshorter on 4/13/2007 4:57:26 PM , Rating: 3
This is to catch people who are careless, and surely they will get sued as an example.

I believe the way around this is simple. I could imagine someone creating a program to basically overlap/scramble 5-10 videos, and "average" the picture out. So if there is a watermark, it will be gone. This will probably take a lot of CPU power and you will need more than one source of the TV show, but it will probably work in theory. Any other ideas?


By darkavatar on 4/14/2007 2:29:40 AM , Rating: 1
Actually, No.

Any invisible digital watermarking technique can't be broken that easily: you can blur it, compress it to JPEG 0%, reduce resolution, rotate a few degrees, even cropping off half the picture, and the watermark can still be extracted. I even heard of one that even printing it out and scanning it back into the computer and it's still there.

But that doesn't mean it's unbeatable, just not possible by simple image manipulation. There's not much to read on the net, so try borrowing books from someone taking a Digital Signal Processing course.


By Lord Evermore on 4/14/2007 8:24:51 PM , Rating: 3
Vtrack is a visual watermark, not invisible. You can't use a digital watermark if somebody is just recording video, it's just an analog image. Convert the format and any "data" other than the image output is gone. The only way to watermark so that it can't be lost that way is visually, which can in some way be destroyed, even if it requires a lot of work. After all, somewhere there is a device/application which can SEE the watermark and therefore tell you what needs to be removed.


By Lord Evermore on 4/14/2007 8:35:00 PM , Rating: 2
Clarification: it is digital, but still a visible watermark (or at least, it's part of the visual data, maybe not something a human could actually pick out). It's digital only because it's inserted into a digital data stream, it's still essentially resulting in an analog output.

So yes, converting the format or other changes will still copy that watermark (I was thinking along the lines of metadata type data in the previous post). But at some point, it's going to get corrupted by format changes. If for example it depends on certain color variations, and your format doesn't cover that color range in the right way, all of a sudden those pixels are the same as surrounding pixels instead of being unique.

Depending on the exact form the watermark takes, overlaying multiple videos could easily ruin it. If it's a string of 25 characters to identify the user, and you layer 3 feeds together and the identifiers are in the same location, you end up with a string that looks like nothing but all 8s (if the characters are in a font like a digital clock or calculator looks). If the marks may be in different random locations of course, it could be harder, but you could also just layer your own watermark over the whole image so that no matter where it is, it's damaged.


By masher2 (blog) on 4/14/2007 9:21:28 PM , Rating: 3
No, the OP was correct...removing a good watermark is extremely difficult. Or rather I should say, its difficult without modifying the original stream so much that considerable image quality is lost.

I don't know how this particular method works, but a typical process is to embed the watermark in the frequency domain of the luminance information for each frame, along with an error-correcting code to allow it to robustly survive MPEG compression, format translations, and direct attempts at tampering. There are others, based on motion vector analysis between successive frames, and even more sophisticated techniques.


By ksuWildcat on 4/15/2007 11:16:03 AM , Rating: 2
I agree 100%. Any visual watermark can be circumvented/removed, but it requires some mechanism which is capable of recognizing the watermark and substituting replacement values (in the case of image pixels, one could use modified bicubic averaging algorithm selecting other neighboring pixels that are not part of the watermark to "guess" what the actual value should have been.)

Obviously, depending on the technique used, this would require some rather intelligent software and powerful hardware.


....
By Comdrpopnfresh on 4/13/2007 3:58:42 PM , Rating: 2
couldn't you simply rig the same technology to super-impose your own unobtrusive watermark over the original so that its indistinguishable? Also, this seems like it would be used with cable HD feeds- which is stupid given that anyone going to great lengths to pirate things probably does not have a legal feed. Also- what is the point of a visual tracker is hdmi keeps all things from being copied anyhow?




RE: ....
By Lonyo on 4/13/2007 4:19:36 PM , Rating: 5
quote:
Also, this seems like it would be used with cable HD feeds- which is stupid given that anyone going to great lengths to pirate things probably does not have a legal feed.

SOMEONE has a legal feed, which they then distribute to all the pirates. I think that is who this is aimed at, tracing the person who does have the legal feed, and thus the person who distributes it to everyone else.
Instead of going after the people who download the pirated material, they are going after the person who supplies it, from how it seems.


RE: ....
By constant on 4/14/2007 12:45:19 AM , Rating: 2
What about rentals and sales thereof?
Are they going to keep track of every single disk created and log who rents and buys them worldwide? I doubt it.
I could care less if they lick and f*** the disk. When they're finished 'marking' it, ce la ve. It's not as if a blockbuster title comes out every week, it's more like once a year.
I can wait


RE: ....
By ToeCutter on 4/14/2007 10:34:27 AM , Rating: 3
Perfect point.

These announcements are obviously provided for the benefit of detached, technically ignorant content providers.

Philips isn't providing VTrack technology to help out their buddies in Hollywood, they're pitching the tech for cold hard cash.

I wonder what the content providers are thinking about the recent circumvention of AACS on BOTH HD-DVD and BluRay? How much cash has been invested in the AACS format over the past several years in prepping the new HD formats?

With heavy hitters like MS, IBM, Toshiba, Sony, Intel and Warner, its safe to assume that millions have been invested in AACS. Despite all the money and effort spent by some of the richest companies on the planet, a kid with a PC and an Xbox HD-DVD drive walked right around all that cutting edge technology. And he did it just a few weeks after he got his hands on the hardware.

Despite all the griping about Apple, they have managed to make a decent buck with iTunes. The reason for the success of iTunes is so crystal clear: It's easy, and it's cheap.

Disclaimer: I'm describing iTunes here, NOT iPod ;-)

I wonder when/if the big content providers will begin to understand this and start offering their products through channels that are cheap and easy. I doubt think anyone wants to steal, I think that media theft is the result of convienience, not intent. Perhaps we'll all have a good laugh about "the ol' DRM days" in the coming years...


RE: ....
By masher2 (blog) on 4/14/2007 11:40:03 AM , Rating: 2
> "a kid with a PC and an Xbox HD-DVD drive walked right around all that cutting edge technology"

He didn't circumvent the technology; he accessed a poorly guarded key. AACS was designed to allow for this...the key will eventually be added to the revocation list, and business will continue as usual.

Furthermore, you're missing on key difference between AACS and VTrack. With the first, a person can put protected content in a Torrent, and the onus on removing that protection falls to the end consumer....a person who can't use it without doing so.

But with VTrack, the burden lies upon the person advertising the Torrent or uploading the video clip to YouTube-- not the person who gets the benefit of the free content. So even if its cracked, it won't stop a pirate reselling that content...but the causual user who places material on the web now has another few steps to go through.

Will it reduce the number of people willing to upload content? I think it will undoubtably...cracked or not.


RE: ....
By masher2 (blog) on 4/14/2007 11:30:12 AM , Rating: 3
> "What about rentals and sales thereof? Are they going to keep track of every single disk created..."

VTrack is intended for Pay TV, not videodiscs. It encodes the subscriber ID into the watermark, so if you record and upload a show, you've essentially just broadcast your name to the world.


RE: ....
By Zoomer on 4/14/2007 10:39:38 AM , Rating: 3
I would really like to see if the watermark could be extracted after someone uploaded it to youtube. :p


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