Partner und Internationale Organisationen
(Englisch)
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Thomson-CSF, UCL, IST, Hispasat, ART3000, FHG-IGD, SACD, CSELT, Barchiv, EPFL
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Abstract
(Englisch)
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The objective of the talisman project was to provide European community service providers with a standard copyright mechanism to protect their digital products against piracy and illegal copying. The project focused on video services and demonstrated the relevance of the mechanisms developed on a very sensitive media broadband system such as a satellite network. The talisman project set up a vertical action in the area of copyright focusing on protection of video sources, providing robust mechanisms to this aim and demonstrating their relevance in close-to-real broadcasting conditions. The project fulfilled the gap above mentioned by developing a hierarchy of solutions starting from low cost ones based upon header description associated with the bit stream, called labeling, up to high end sophisticated, embedded, holographically inlayed, and undeletable systems, called watermarking.
The following goals were achieved in the project:
· Development and design of a common functional model (CFM) for IPR protection and IPR services. The CFM is very useful to identify major actors and establish their interrelation, leading to functional requirements and specifications.
· Demonstration of a fully functional ipr protection system under real conditions, that is real time monitoring of works broadcast on satellite at different bitrates. The developed system is close to a product to be sold. Furthermore the developed products is among the first ones in the world operating on video. The proposed solution is bases on labeling, watermarking and other security tools. The final system performs the following tasks: watermark insertion, label insertion, real time watermark monitoring for copyright identification, real time label monitoring for data authentication.
· Design of a labeling technology based on feature extraction for data authentication. An edge based approach has been selected for feature selection.
· Design of several digital watermarking methods for still images and video to assure ownership. The main watermarking methods is block based and modifies transform coefficients to embed the digital watermark. Other methods were developed to identify horizontal and vertical translations of the work.
· Hardware implementation of the monitoring system.
· Standardization activities on three fronts; DAVIC, MPEG-4, EBU/SMPTE.
Scientific conclusions have also been derived from the project. Talisman successful realizations have been due to an ongoing, permanent experimental process with retro-action over developments. Evaluation and experiments were needed on two fronts: invisibility and robustness. Invisibility is one of the key difficulties for assessing the performances of digital watermarking. No standard benchmarking is existing by the time being and the only references on the topic are the experimental conditions used in close developments such as MPEG-2 encoders. Nevertheless, such conditions are not totally relevant for assessing a watermarking system, as requirements, in watermarking, require total invisibility in studio conditions by professionals' eyes. Talisman has used an experimental approach for quality assessment, benefiting from rtbf professionals visualizing works in double blinded conditions. This enabled to reach remarkable quality. Furthermore, watermarking on videos, owing to talisman solutions, is close to maturity. This is not yet the case for still pictures, which is due to the fact that manipulations and attacks over still pictures are much easier than on videos, requiring dedicated expensive equipment and are perpetually in renewal. Talisman, for still pictures, is at the level of the competition and of the state-of-the-art. Basic research is needed in order to be able to resist to attacks such as stirmark or unzign which combines linear and non linear transforms, at which no method in the world is able to resist to. Therefore, watermarking is still an open topic still needing theoretical research. Talisman already resists to unzign with default parameters.
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