Preventing Copyright Infringement of Digital Media

The prevention of copyright infringement of digital image, video or audio content is a very pressing problem for media industries such as film and music. Two important tools for multimedia information security are data hiding (i.e., data watermarking and steganography) and robust hashing. Dr Neil Hurley, Dr Félix Balado and other members of the Information Hiding Laboratory are using mathematical and statistical modelling to propose optimal solutions to these problems.

Many existing multimedia information security solutions are limited by their heuristic or ad-hoc foundations. In particular, most these techniques have not been derived from information theoretical analyses. Also mathematical modelling is in many cases unavailable, which precludes gaining a thorough understanding of their behaviour. For example, it is not possible to properly optimise techniques without a mathematical model, and parameter tweaking (or trial and error) becomes the only available approach for increasing performance in that case.

Overcoming such shortcomings is central to the research agenda of the Information Hiding Laboratory at CSI. The mathematical analysis and development of general algorithms provided by the group has far ranging information security applications such as copy tracking, authentication, integrity checking and proof of ownership.

In 2005, the group received a best research paper award for `New geometric analysis of spread-spectrum data hiding with repetition coding, with implications for side-informed schemes', which was presented at the 4th International Workshop in Digital Watermarking, Siena, Italy, 2005. One patent has been filed so far by the project team: K. M. Whelan, F. Balado, N. J.  Hurley and G. C. M. Silvestre. "Spatial Sampling Grid Recovery", Irish Application, priority date Oct. 2006, FR Kelly Ref no. P81666IE00/CB/VC.

Some significant publications that document this work include:

• Hurley, N.J., Balado, F. and Silvestre, G. C. M. (2008) 'Markov modelling of fingerprinting systems for collision analysis'. EURASIP, Journal on Information Security.
• Balado, F., Whelan, K.M., Silvestre, G.C.M. and Hurley, N.J. (2005) 'Joint iterative decoding and estimation for side-informed data hiding'. IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, 53 (10):4006-4019.