Combined encryption and watermarking approaches for scalable multimedia coding

Abstract

Intellectual Property (IP) protection is a critical element in a multimedia transmission system. Conventional IP protection schemes can be categorized into two major branches: encryption and watermarking. In this paper, a structure to perform layered access protection by combining encryption and robust watermarking is proposed and implemented. By taking advantage of the nature of cryptographic schemes and digital watermarking, the copyright of multimedia contents can be well protected. We adopt the scalable transmission method over the broadcasting environment. The embedded watermark can be thus extracted with high confidence. Then, the next-layer secrets can be perfectly decrypted and reconstructed. Finally, the media contents are recovered.