An MPEG-4 IPMPX design and implementation on MPEG-21 test bed

With the growing demand for distributing digital media contents, the issues of protecting the rights of digital contents are becoming more and more important. We introduce the MPEG-4 IPMPX (intellectual property management and protection extension) specification and design its implementation architecture on the MPEG-21 multimedia test bed. This flexible system is capable of having IPMPX tools, such as encryption/decryption and digital watermarking, integrated into it. The main contributions are: (1) we design and integrate a software architecture of the IPMPX system and its APIs into the standard-compliant MPEG-21 test bed; (2) the implementation of the IPMPX architecture is close to the original IPMPX concepts and thus provides a good validation of IPMPX capabilities; (3) we develop an application example on the IPMPX-enabled MPEG-21 test bed to show its powerful functionalities. The IPMPX subsystem together with the application example has been completed and is described.