Multimedia Content Distribution Research Articles

Forensic analysis of nonlinear collusion attacks for multimedia fingerprinting

Digital fingerprinting is a technology for tracing the distribution of multimedia content and protecting them from unauthorized redistribution. Unique identification information is embedded into each distributed copy of multimedia signal and serves as a digital fingerprint. Collusion attack is a cost-effective attack against digital fingerprinting, where colluders combine several copies with the same content but different fingerprints to remove or attenuate the original fingerprints. In this paper, we investigate the average collusion attack and several basic nonlinear collusions on independent Gaussian fingerprints, and study their effectiveness and the impact on the perceptual quality. With unbounded Gaussian fingerprints, perceivable distortion may exist in the fingerprinted copies as well as the copies after the collusion attacks. In order to remove this perceptual distortion, we introduce bounded Gaussian-like fingerprints and study their performance under collusion attacks. We also study several commonly used detection statistics and analyze their performance under collusion attacks. We further propose a preprocessing technique of the extracted fingerprints specifically for collusion scenarios to improve the detection performance.

Hourglass multimedia content and service composition framework for smart room environments

Pervasive environments with their ubiquitous multimedia devices such as video-enabled cell-phones, laptops, PC tablets, digital cameras, HDTV plasma displays are becoming integral part of our workplaces and homes. Furthermore, these digital multimedia devices make it easier and easier to create and view volumes of content that can be stored throughout the Internet. The big challenge is to organize the distributed content, get the distributed multimedia content composed, produced and distributed to users in customized fashion according to users’ preference, and their resource availabilities in pervasive environments. Basically, the challenge is to create Internet Interactive Television where the user/interest group, residing in a pervasive environment, corresponds to the TV program director who decides and/or influences what content(s) will be viewed, how it will be composed, presented and delivered. In this paper, we present a vision how this challenge can be solved. We propose a novel hourglass-based system that delivers composite multimedia content to users in pervasive environments, which considers both users’ interest in the content and the presentation capabilities of various display devices. This hourglass-based system relies on our content and service composition framework that allows for customized production, distribution and presentation of multimedia content for pervasive environments. We present the hourglass design, possible solutions for some content composition scenarios and validate the solutions via selected experiments.

An Efficient and Anonymous Buyer-Seller Watermarking Protocol

For the purpose of deterring unauthorized duplication and distribution of multimedia contents, a seller may insert a unique digital watermark into each copy of the multimedia contents to be sold. When an illegal replica is found in the market sometime later, the seller can determine the responsible distributor by examining the watermark embedded. However, the accusation against the charged distributor, who was the buyer in some earlier transaction, is objectionable because the seller also has access to the watermarked copies and, hence, is able to release such a replica on her own. In this paper, a watermarking protocol is proposed to avoid such difficulties, known as the customer's right problem, in the phase of arbitration. The proposed watermarking protocol also provides a fix to Memon and Wong's scheme by solving the unbinding problem. In addition, the buyer is no longer required to contact the watermark certification authority during transactions, and the anonymity of the buyer can be retained through a trusted third party. The result is an efficient and anonymous buyer-seller watermarking protocol.

P2P 네트웍에서 연속형 미디어 컨텐츠의 분산형 배포 기법

A peer-to-peer model is very useful in solving the server link bottleneck problem of a client-server model. In this work, we discuss the problems of distributing multimedia content over peer-to-peer network. We focus on two problems in peer-to-peer media content distribution systems. The first is the transmission scheduling of the media data for a multi-source streaming session. We present a sophisticated scheduling scheme called fixed-length slotted scheduling, which results in minimum buffering delay. The second problem is on the fast distribution of media content in the peer-to-peer system that is self-growing. We propose a mechanism accelerating the speed at which the system`s streaming ca-pacity increases, called FAST.

Optimal allocation of electronic content

The delivery of large files to individual users, such as video on demand or application programs to the envisioned network computers is expected by many to be one of the main tasks of broadband communication networks. This requires high bandwidth capacity as well as fast and dense storage servers. This motivates multimedia service providers to optimize the delivery network, as well as the electronic content allocation. A hierarchical architecture for the distribution of multimedia content was introduced by Nussbaumer, Patel, Schaffa, and Sterbenz (INFOCOM 94). They addressed the trade-off between bandwidth and storage requirements that results from the placement of the content servers in the hierarchy tree. They presented a centralized algorithm to compute the best level of the hierarchy for the server location to minimize the combined cost of communication and storage. In this work, we solve a general case where servers can be placed at different levels of the hierarchy. We develop a distributed optimal location algorithm that requires small nodal memory capacity and computational power. Previous results for related problems for caching system design are of higher complexity. Previous results for related classic operations research problems are limited to centralized algorithms, based on linear programming, that are not easy to convert into distributed algorithms. Instead, to obtain our results, we observed that the use of dynamic programming naturally lends itself to a distributed implementation. For the specific problem at hand, we also managed to find a natural function (a generalization of the problem) that simplifies the combination operation used in the design of a dynamic program.

File distribution in networks with multimedia storage servers

AbstractIn this paper, we consider a problem in networks with storage servers for providing multimedia service. The design involves assigning communication link capacity, sizing the multimedia servers, and distributing different types of content at each server, while guaranteeing an upper limit on the individual end‐to‐end blocking probability. We consider alternative methods for obtaining the end‐to‐end blocking probability with low computation time and present optimization procedures to obtain an optimal solution. Under a linear cost structure, our numerical investigations consider different scenarios that might be helpful in understanding how to distribute multimedia content for a cost‐optimized solution. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

New Trends in Multimedia Standards: MPEG4 and JPEG2000

Introduction Multimedia has long played an important role in the process of informing activities: learning, studying, researching, and communicating, which can be summed up in an old Chinese saying, A picture is worth one thousand words. The ability to see, hear, and interact with the material that a client is interested in provides valuable additional dimension to a client's learning experience. With the introduction of personal computers in 1980s, CD-ROM based learning has long been an established part of the educational process and a fast developing market. However, with the fast adoption of the Internet and the continuous development in PC processor speed and capability, a promising new era in multimedia, both in informing and entertainment applications, is just beginning. With an alarming rate, much of the world's knowledge base is moving on-line. It is already a reality in many parts of the United States that school children can access a web site over a cable modem or ADSL modem at home, pulling off a detailed marketing report for his/her term paper. In the near future, he would also be able to listen to a live broadcast of a lecture on the same subject he is researching, interact with the materials through an animated graphical user interface, and watch a short clip of video on that subject, all through a single standardized file format and protocol. Standards have long played pivotal roles in the development of multimedia equipment and contents. The need for standardization in multimedia applications is not a choice, but a necessity. To be able to widely distribute multimedia content to readers, we must be sure that the format of the files that contain the media content can be recognized and decoded correctly no matter what devices or platforms the users are using. On the other hand, standards have significantly facilitated the spread of multimedia contents. Just look at the impact of JPEG on the distribution of images, and MPEG1/MPEG2 on the distribution of video. In recent years, responding to the development of many promising new technologies in the field of multimedia and the practical needs of many commercial applications, the Geneva-based International Standards Organization (ISO) has undertaken two new projects in the last few years: MPEG4 and JPEG2000. MPEG4 is aimed at standardizing a framework for the representation and delivery of multimedia contents such as video, audio, text, and graphics in a unified framework, while JPEG2000 is focused on developing the next-generation image compression and representation standard. It is widely expected that the introduction of these two standards will become a significant catalyst driving the future growth of the multimedia industry, and will provide better tools for all participants in the informing science areas. In the following, we introduce in more details the new technologies in the upcoming MPEG4 and JEPG2000 standards. Section 2 covers MPEG4, and JPEG2000 is covered in Section 3. We conclude by summarizing the new technology and features, and elaborate more on their implications for multimedia applications. The MPEG4 Video and Multimedia Standard MPEG4 Overview MPEG-4 is an ISO/IEC standard being developed by MPEG (Moving Pictures Experts Group). MPEG also developed the Emmy award winning standards MPEG-1 and MPEG-2. MPEG-1 was an audiovisual coding standard aimed at addressing the storage and retrieval of multimedia information on a CD-ROM [1]. MPEG-2 followed closely behind MPEG1 and was a standard that addressed the broadcast TV applications. MPEG-2 was a hugely successful standard with significant acceptance in the market place with a number of other applications in addition to broadcast TV [1]. Some of the prominent applications of MPEG-2 include Direct Broadcast Satellite (DBS), Digital Versatile Disk (DVD) and High Resolution Television (HDTV). Initially MPEG-3 was reserved for HDTV applications. …

A tutorial on the Digital Audio-Visual Council (DAVIC) standardisation activity

International compatibility for the distribution of video and multimedia content through communication networks is something which has thus far not been achieved. New digital systems provide an opportunity for global compatibility between audio and video transmission and full multimedia communications incorporating text, data, audio, still and moving video in an interactive environment. It is with this commercial opportunity in mind that the Digital Audio-Visual Council (DAVIC) has been created and its first standards, DAVIC1.0 and 1.1, have been released. In Europe the European Commission is actively supporting the development of DAVIC through its Advanced Communications Technologies and Services (ACTS) initiative but DAVIC has widespread international support.