Bandwidth efficient fingerprint multicast for video streaming

Digital fingerprinting embeds unique information in each distributed copy and can be used to protect multimedia from illegal redistribution. In video streaming applications, there are a large number of users and a huge amount of data to transmit. Thus, given a multimedia fingerprinting system with the required robustness, it is essential to distribute fingerprinted copies efficiently without revealing the embedded fingerprints. We propose a bandwidth efficient fingerprint multicast scheme that can be used with most spread spectrum embedding based multimedia fingerprinting systems, and analyze its bandwidth efficiency. We also propose a fingerprint drift compensation for the fingerprint multicast scheme to improve the quality of the reconstructed frames at the receiver's side without increasing the communication cost.