Technique Aims To Protect, Possibly Improve Internet Video

Digital watermarking, or steganography, is a procedure in which hidden patterns are embedded into an image or document on the World Wide Web. The patterns can then be used to verify the image as authentic, protecting intellectual property rights for people who create digital media.

However, watermarking is especially difficult to use for Internet video. As video is transmitted over the "noisy," traffic-congested Internet, a number of frames never make it to the receiving end. The frames, including those that may contain digital watermarks, are lost, said Edward Delp, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue.

The Purdue research concerns a technique that "resynchronizes" video at the receiving end of the transmission, preventing the frames from being lost.

New findings will be detailed in a paper to be presented Jan. 23 during an international conference called Security and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents IV, in San Jose, Calif. The paper was written by Delp, Purdue doctoral student Eugene T. Lin and Christine Podilchuk, a research engineer at Lucent Technologies/Bell Laboratories.

The technique aims to benefit anyone who wants to stream video content over the Internet, from broadcasters to law enforcement officials.

"Perhaps a surveillance camera is looking at a scene," Delp said. "Instead of sending it through some sort of broadcast medium, it could be sent over the Internet."

The resynchronization technique also might have applications in deciphering hidden watermark messages incorporated into Internet video for illicit purposes, including communications among terrorists. Digital media can be screened for hidden terrorist messages by using "steganalysis," which will be the subject of a special session during the conference, Delp said.

Because digital video will become more common over the next five years, techniques will be needed soon to maintain the quality of video as it is transmitted over the Web.

"The network is overloaded, and you get dropouts, or missing data," Delp said. "You can get enough errors to make the video almost unwatchable."

Standard "error correction" techniques used to recover lost data in e-mail transmissions do not work for video and audio transmissions.

The researchers have created a computer algorithm — a series of steps that enable a computer to complete a task — that promises to solve the problem.

"We have developed a mechanism under which, at the receiving end, you will be able to correct the errors that occurred in the Internet transmission and be able to recover the hidden messages in video," Delp said.

Video relies on critical split-second timing for individual frames that follow one another. The precise, rapid firing of 30 frames per second creates the illusion of continuous movement.

As video is transmitted over the Internet, however, it is difficult to maintain this delicate timing.

The new technique resynchronizes the transmission at the receiving end, fixing errors that throw off the timing and result in lost information.

The very nature of video makes watermarking difficult.

"You are presented with 30 frames per second, and your eye integrates those to make it look like continuous motion," Delp said. "But your eye is real susceptible to any subtle changes in the images from one frame to the next.

"If you don't properly put the watermark into the video, you can see the watermarked image, which is not supposed to be visible."

To properly embed watermarks into video, the Purdue researchers use a computer program that mimics how people see video.

"We exploit a human visual system model that tells us what you can see and what you can't see when its moving," Delp said.

The technique might be used to improve the quality of Internet video. "But the research is not focused in this direction yet," he said.

The Purdue researchers have been working on digital watermarking for more than five years, and they began working on developing techniques for video about two years ago.

"We are showing that our technique is probably better than any of the other current techniques for watermarking resynchronization," Delp said. "But to solve the entire problem to my satisfaction is going to take almost two more years."

Delp is co-chair of the conference, which attracts researchers from about 40 nations, and he is chair of the "video techniques" session that includes his paper. The conference is sponsored by the International Society for Optical Engineering and the Society for Imaging Science and Technology.