A Colorization Based Animation Broadcast System with Traitor Tracing Capability

Distributing video contents via broadcasting network mechanisms has become a promising business opportunity for the entertainment industry. However, since content piracy is always a serious problem, broadcasted contents must be adequately protected. Rather than implementing sophisticate key-management schemes for access control, an animation broadcast system based on colorization techniques is proposed. In the proposed system, gray-level animation video sequences are delivered via broadcast mechanisms, such as multicast, to reduce the overhead in server processing and network bandwidth. Moreover, color seeds labeled with fingerprint codes are delivered to each client through low-bandwidth auxiliary connections and then used to generate high-quality full-color animations with slight differences between versions received by each client-side device. When a user illegally duplicates and distributes the received video, his identity can be easily found out by examining features extracted from the pirated video. The proposed scheme also shows good resistance to collusion attacks where two or more users cooperate to generate an illegal copy in expectation of getting rid of legal responsibility. The proposed scheme exhibits advantages in network bandwidth, system performance and content security.