Direct Fingerprinting on Multicasting Compressed Video

A video fingerprint is a kind of digital watermark used in digital video for tracking pirate copies in a multi-user environment. Different users receive the same video with different watermarks designed for uniquely identifying designated users. As a value-added business service, fingerprinting is independent from video compression. In current fingerprinting schemes, a compressed video has to be decoded once for every user in order to add on individual fingerprints. Then the video is encoded again before the dispatch. However, the multiple decode/re-encode operations can result in poor system performance. In this paper, we propose a new integrated fingerprint algorithm, which can be applied directly to the compressed video without decoding/reencoding. Our experiments show that the performance of fingerprinting improved with no compromise to the robustness.