Genetic-Based Fingerprinting for Multicast Multimedia

The unicast method is a more efficient scheme to transmit multimedia data to massive users to compare with the multicast method. However, the ease of delivery of multimedia data may cause the copyrights to be violated easily, and the fingerprinting scheme is one of effective means for conquering this problem. The fingerprinting process often generates the multimedia contents into many different versions, which have to be transmitted via the unicast method. In this chapter, we propose a new genetic fingerprinting scheme for copyright protection of multicast media. In this method, the encryption and decryption keys, which aim at scrambling and descrambling multimedia contents, are first produced with genetic algorithms. Next, multimedia data are then encrypted and multicast to all clients. At the same time, a secure channel is employed to unicast a designated decryption key to each client. When a user deploys the designated key to decrypt the received data, a corresponding fingerprint would be embedded into the contents. Once upon the reception of the fingerprinted content, the embedded fingerprint can be extracted shortly, and the copyright can be confirmed and assured. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can transmit multimedia data to clients effectively and cause only a slight degradation in perceptual quality.