For effective anti-piracy measures, video watermarking standards must adhere to Cartesian robustness principles

Watermarking systems have evolved into the industry standard for preventing infringement and piracy attacks on premium material. It assists content owners and distributors in identifying and protecting their copyright, as well as identifying the source of video leakage. Imperceptibility, data payload, security, and robustness are critical characteristics of an efficient watermark.

The robustness of a video watermarking technology indicates its resistance to piracy and signal processing procedures. After embedding a watermark into a content file, distortions during encoding, decoding, or internet dissemination are unavoidable. These distortions may be required to allow for essential watermark adjustments or to compress the watermark before to transmission.

While DRM protected content can assist safeguard video assets during transmission, watermarking can help dissuade piracy on the user’s device. A robust video watermarking solution should be resistant to both these distortions and intentional attempts by pirates. The Cartesian watermark security testing system was created to evaluate the technology’s strength. It was developed in conjunction with providers of watermarking solutions, MovieLabs, Hollywood studios, and the Motion Picture Association of America, and is widely used in the media and entertainment industries for testing content protection solutions.

The Cartesian evaluation process measures the watermarking solution’s resilience by simulating the tampering tactics used by pirates to unlawfully access and redistribute digital information. Robustness is measured by the watermark’s resistance to alterations of the video stream.

Downscaling, collusion, transcoding, frame rate modification, compression, aspect ratio alteration, geometrical changes, reverse engineering, capturing techniques, and cropping are all popular piracy techniques used to tamper with or fully remove the watermark. The Cartesian process generates a series of simulations in which the watermark is attacked to varying degrees using one or more of these methods in order to discover the point at which the watermark becomes irrecoverable. The greater the attack’s intensity or the greater the variety of attack types that the solution can sustain, the more robust the solution is.

The algorithm’s secrecy, unpredictable nature, spatial distribution of the watermark, difficulty of reverse engineering, and blindness all contribute to the robustness. While watermarking is not a universal solution, content owners can implement a comprehensive solution using Cartesian testing methodologies.

The number of transactions assigned to a single user can also be reduced by repeating the same transaction number for a predetermined period of time. The user would thus receive the same payload for any access to the same content within the specified time frame, which would prevent collusion between copies of a single user. Additionally, a high payload bitrate could aid in enhancing anti-collusion measures. This can be controlled by the adaptive bitrate segment duration in some two-step watermarking implementations or made a property of the watermarking technology itself. They are also undetectable to the viewer and pirates, and can be quickly scaled up because they are based on the cloud. In addition, they are able to operate on low video resolutions to identify the source of piracy, as well as on high video resolutions.