Genetic fingerprinting for copyright protection of multicast media

Generally speaking, comparing to the unicast or broadcast methods, it is more efficient to transmit multimedia data via the multicast method to massive users. However, the ease of delivery of multimedia data may cause the copyright of such multimedia to be easily infringed upon, and the fingerprinting scheme is one of effective means for conquering this problem. Fingerprint embedding process often generates the multimedia contents into many different versions, which have to be transmitted via the unicast method. In this paper, we propose a new genetic fingerprinting scheme for copyright protection of multicast video. In this method, the encryption and decryption keys, which aim at scrambling and descrambling multimedia contents, are first produced with genetic algorithms. Next, multimedia data are then encrypted and multicast to all users. At the same time, a secure channel is employed to unicast a designated decryption key to each user. When a user deploys the designated key to decrypt the received data, a corresponding fingerprint would be embedded into the contents. Once upon the reception of the fingerprinted multimedia content, the embedded fingerprint can be extracted shortly, and the copyright can be confirmed and assured. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can transmit multimedia data to clients effectively and cause only a slight degradation in perceptual quality.