Hidden trail to video pirates
DEMAND for new ways to trace unlawful downloading and sharing of multimedia data has led to a team of researchers receiving funding from the Australian Research Council to advance next-generation audio watermarking.
The techniques can trace illegal copying and distribution of data containing a sound component, such as music and video.
Deakin University’s Professor Yong Xiang, from the School of Information Technology, will work with former Deakin Professor Wanlei Zhou (now of University of Technology Sydney) and Deakin’s Professor Gleb Beliakov and Dr Longxiang Gao in partnership with Flag Explore Pty Ltd to develop inaudible, robust and high-capacity audio watermarking technology.
Prof Xiang said the project’s outcomes would provide a ready-to-use audio watermarking solution for realworld applications and help prevent financial and job losses in the Australian multimedia industry.
“Multimedia piracy is a serious problem and the financial loss caused by illegal multimedia data downloading and sharing is enormous,” Prof Xiang said.
“It not only harms the intellectual property owners, but causes significant damage to the Australian economy due to revenue and job losses.
“This issue is particularly important to our industry partner Flag Explore, which provides online live streaming services to end-users.
“Its business largely relies on the effective protection of its copyrighted audio and sound video data.”
Revelations that season seven of the HBO hit TV show Game of Thrones was pirated more than one billion times within seven weeks of its release in 2017 made global headlines, while illegal sharing of music is a worldwide problem.
In Australia, around 2.8 million people download music illegally via file sharing networks and one billion songs are illegally traded by Austra- lians every year. Digital audio watermarking hides watermark data, such as publisher information, user identity and file transaction/downloading records, into the audio signal without affecting its normal usage.
Using a secret key, the owner of the data, or law- enforcement agencies, can extract the watermark data to trace the source of illegal distribution.
Prof Xiang said an effective and practical watermarking scheme should include the important characteristics of imperceptibility, robustness against conventional attacks and high embedding capacity.
“Although a number of methods have been proposed for audio watermarking, built upon various mechanisms, none of them can ensure imperceptibility, robustness, and high embedding capacity simultaneously, and they are particularly vulnerable to collusion attacks,” he said.
“As a result, their application in practice is restrictive.
“There is an urgent need to develop inaudible, robust and high-capacity audio watermarking techniques that will deter multimedia data infringement and help authorities trace and punish pirates.
“The audio watermarking technology developed in this project will provide a ready-touse solution to tackling copyright infringement and build a solid foundation for developing other multimedia piracy tracing products.”