There is a new watermarking system that may be coming our way soon. It's a method of creating an identifying tag to a film that is not detectable to the human eye. But, with a little digital hocus pocus, even a poor quality and grainy camcorder movie can be identified back to it's last legitimate source. This invisible technology can already point a finger at the theater where camcorder-wielding pirates responsible for bootlegging "The Incredibles" did their dirty work. It has the implanted a secret code called iTrace placed into the film, so they can do some backtracking!
The technology was developed by Sarnoff scientists, including Jeffrey Lubin, who used his background in perceptual psychology - vision - to devise a watermark that not only would be invisible to the movie viewer, but would survive even if the movie quality was degraded because of crude copying. "The Holy Grail example is someone takes a camcorder into a movie theater and pirates a movie, and then compresses it on a digital file and puts it on the Internet," Lubin said. The watermark occurs gradually, over the course of five seconds, to exploit the tendency of human vision to compensate and ignore images that change slowly, he said. The watermark itself is neither words nor numbers, but blobs that slowly get either lighter or darker. It is repeated throughout the film. The sequence of light and dark blobs is unique to each legitimate copy, he said. To crack the code, a pirated copy is compared on a computer, frame by frame, to a version of the film that lacks a watermark. Since the images on both versions are digitized, the computer can "subtract" the version that lacks a watermark from the bootleg. What is left is the watermark, Lubin said. As a security precaution, the version lacking a watermark has frames that are much smaller than those used for typical viewing, so it would be of no interest to pirates. |
I can't see how this technology will be used to catch a camcorder pirate. As I read the article, it can only show where the film was pirated. But, take it a step further and assume that the pirate has a particular theater where he films his "productions". Then it starts to make some sense in a situation where they can wait for the guy to show up and nab him or her the next time around. But, that would be a long shot at best.
Source: My Way
