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Forensic watermarking is a technology that deters piracy by providing means to copyright owners to trace back the identity of the original recipient of a video in case it appears on unauthorized sharing platforms. Historically, its use has been somewhat limited to professional environments e.g. for pre-release material movie distribution and in digital cinemas. MovieLabs recently released a specification that mandates the use of such forensic watermarks to deliver premium UHD content, thereby opening doors for mass market deployment of watermarking in CE environment.

Correlation-based watermark detection inherently assumes that a pseudo-random watermark pattern is present in the cover signal at a given location. However, disparity-coherent watermarks for stereo video content are broken into pieces which are offset one with respect to the others. Acoustic transmission yields echoes due to multi-path propagation and may thus introduce watermark replicates in the recorded audio track. In such cases, the watermark energy is not concentrated in a single element of the cross-correlation array but rather distributed over a number of them.

Radial-based 3D watermarking alters the distances between the center of mass of the 3D mesh and its vertices. These watermarking systems are inherently sensitive to cropping. To address this limitation, this paper introduces a complementary blind resynchronization module to transmit critical synchronization information to the watermark decoder. Spherical patterns formed by several secret landmark vertices are embedded alongside the payload and blindly retrieved by the decoder, thereby conveying the synchronization information needed.

This talk will be organized in three main parts. To begin with, I will review the ecosystem of the Entertainment industry, survey the different tools available to combat piracy and introduce the multimedia forensics workflow typically in use today. Next, I will focus on digital watermarking, a technology used to introduce imperceptible machine-readable markers in multimedia content. After briefly going through fundamentals, I will describe in more details the 2-step watermarking strategy adopted by Technicolor and discuss its pros and cons e.g.