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 can be categorized into encryption and watermarking. In this paper, a structure to perform layered access control of scalable media by combining encryption and robust watermarking is proposed and implemented. By taking advantage of the nature of both encryption and watermarking, copyrights of multimedia content can be well protected. In the summated example, we assume a scalable transmission scheme over the broadcasting environment and test the effectiveness of the proposed method. The embedded watermark can be extracted with high confidence. Then, the next temporal-layer keys can be perfectly decrypted and reconstructed. Finally, the media contents are recovered and the copyrights are assured.