Layered access control schemes on watermarked scalable media

Intellectual Property (IP) protection is a critical element in multimedia transmission and delivery systems. Conventional IP protection on multimedia data can be categorized into encryption and watermarking. In this paper, a structure to perform layered access control on scalable media by combining encryption and robust watermarking is proposed, implemented, and verified. By taking advantages of the nature of both encryption and watermarking, copyrights of multimedia contents can be well protected and at the same time, multiple-grade services can be provided. In the summated examples, we assume a scalable transmission scheme over the broadcasting environment and use it to test the effectiveness of proposed method. When the embedded watermark is extracted with high confidence, the key to decrypt the next layer can be perfectly recovered. Then, the media contents are reconstructed and the copyrights are assured. The application examples also demonstrate the practicality of the proposed system.