AfterDawn: Tech news

MPEG-7 standard will include intense video content identification technology

Written by Andre Yoskowitz @ 11 May 2010 2:30 User comments (16)

MPEG-7 standard will include intense video content identification technology NEC has announced today that its video content identification technology will be supported in the upcoming MPEG-7 video standard, meaning content owners that release videos with the standard can "detect illegal copies" uploaded to the Internet almost instantly.
The company says each frame has its own unique signature, meaning that doing any editing to the file or analog or camera copies will completely alter the overall signature of the original video.

NEC says "these developments are expected to significantly reduce the time and cost of manual content inspections as well as improve the scale and accuracy of content assessment."

Among the features of the video content identification technology are:

Accurate detection of copied or altered video content
Video signatures are extracted for each frame based on differences in the luminance between sets of sub-regions on a frame that are defined by a variety of locations, sizes, and shapes. Video signatures represent a unique fingerprint that can be individually detected frame by frame. This technology is capable of accurately detecting video content with that was created with such editing operations as analog capturing (*3), re-encoding (*4) and caption overlay (*5), which was conventionally very difficult to detect.



A high detection rate and low false positive rate for all video contents
By estimating confidence of signatures generated from each frame and using the confidence for sequence identification, the technology achieves a high detection rate (*6) with a very low false positive rate (*7). These technologies achieved an average detection rate of 96% at a very low false alarm rate of 5ppm (5 in one million) through tests conducted by the international standardization organization.

Detection of short video scenes
Due to the high identification capability of signatures, the technology is capable of accurately detecting video scenes as short as 2 seconds (60 frames), which was formerly impossible when using conventional methods.

Compatibility with home PCs
By designing a compact signature size of 76 bytes per frame, the storage memory required for the matching process is minimized. As a result, a home-class PC (*8) can match approximately 1,000 hours of video in 1 second. Due to the proliferation of video distribution services on the Internet, the detection and deletion of illegally distributed and copied video content (copyright infringement) has become a crucial issue for content holders and service providers. This problem has conventionally been addressed by manual inspection which is incapable of accurately tracking the constantly growing volume of Internet content. In order to solve this issue, various automatic detection tools have been proposed, such as digital watermarks where content is embedded with special code, and the use of image retrieval technology. However, it was prohibitively difficult to accurately inspect large databases, short content or video produced through various editing operations. These new technologies resolve each of the above issues.

The tech was approved in late April, and will be officially published sometime during September.



NEC plans to demo the tech this week.

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16 user comments

111.5.2010 03:11

But when videos are uploaded to usenet or 1 click sites they are usually in a RAR,FAIL. Will it work when a clip is converted to FLV for use on you tube? I think not,FAIL again (besides which you tube clips are usually paid for and fair use)

211.5.2010 03:44

76 bytes per frame x 60fps (120 for 3D) x 60 seconds per min x 60 mins per hour x 2 hours (some movies are longer, some shorter) = ~32MB per movie...so it may be more functional than a md5, but it is by no means a compact addition...it is almost like having an md5 tag for each frame.

The good news is that this "protection" is so heavy that most pirates will strip it to save space...they strip the subtitles already...and those are only about 2-4mb per stream...and subtitles are actually used by some; no one but the MPAA will be using this "feature".

311.5.2010 03:45

Screw MPEG-7. I'll happily stick with the tried-and-true MPEG-2 & MPEG-4.

411.5.2010 03:53

Originally posted by beanos66:
But when videos are uploaded to usenet or 1 click sites they are usually in a RAR,FAIL. Will it work when a clip is converted to FLV for use on you tube? I think not,FAIL again (besides which you tube clips are usually paid for and fair use)
Yeah think its going to stop no one, people will either re-encode to x264 or someones going to rip off nec codec and remove the feature of the signature marking.

Protection/DRM = FAIL

511.5.2010 04:24

lool

611.5.2010 04:30

It clearly states that it checks luma, so embeding in flv or reencoding to x264 won't help. BUT... you'll just have to add some black/white bars and set the overscan so noone sees the bars and the luma check will be useless.

711.5.2010 04:50
Paula_X
Inactive

pointless.. they know the source of content immediately anyway.. a dvd rip has come from a dvd and a cam has been filmed in a cinema.. strewth.. talk about pointless.. Watch nobody use this "standard" .. except the drm peddlars of course who will do the usual whining when their plans fail.

I think somebody doesn't know what "luma" means.. that's the part of any video signal which carries the actual detail rather than colour information, so reencoding to any other format which rebuilds the video information will kill this drm stone dead.

811.5.2010 05:24

"pointless.. they know the source of content immediately anyway.. a dvd rip has come from a dvd and a cam has been filmed in a cinema"

Actually, many pre-release releases are from screeners that are sent to raters, awards judges, etc...and they could possibly use this to track back to whoever the source was. Still, not very useful since they already have means of doing this.

911.5.2010 05:46
Paula_X
Inactive

Indeed.. that's what I meant by "dvd" .. how many screeners do we see in the wild, but if they were to do a dvd release at the same time as the cinema release and run a once only showing for the reviewers etc they could get round that easily. I'm not going to give them any more ideas than they need.. but a reviewer doesn't need a full quality release to review a film.. hell.. these days I think they just write what the studios pay them to for a good 75% of the titles. Anyhow.. heres a thing they haven't thought of. I saw a cammed film and decided to actually go to the flicks rather than download and watch on my small tv.. one sale they would have never got otherwise.

I suggested this before, but they are way to greedy to run with it.. how about those movie mags that come out every month.. what's wrong with sticking a disk on them with the months films on it in 640x480 divx? or even knocking out vcd's of the films at say a couple of quid each right at cinema time?.. would kill the cammers stone dead... It's the cams where the real pirates make their money.. £5 a shot for a dvd from a download.. that's what we make for a couple of weeks.. people want to see the film before taking the kids to the cinema... other thoughts.. how about starting up a "movies reviewed independent" website and getting listed as "reviewers" to get into the screener lists?.. what a plan.. hahaha. They will never put a stop to anything while our .ru friends have friends who work for the outlets.

1011.5.2010 10:39

this wont have much of a stopping power on anything Camed its for origonal copies like leaked screeners or dvd rips but camed and video from a broadcast signal shouldn't carry the files across the broad cate to another dvd writer so 5 mins of thought this wont work what they need to do is create a file that un scambles a mask on the origonal that can only be read on a dvd player this way it cant be copyed and it becomes a no issue its the copies of the dvd that affect the sales bye day one someone has rented the dvd or bought it copied it and took it back to the store got their money back and a copy to boot... so make it a hidden file that dosnt get copied with the movie files like a 2end partition on a hard drive.... ? just a thought

1111.5.2010 12:22

Paula_X, they don't talk about absolute luma, but luma difference. The pattern of luma difference doesn't change much when reencoding. It doesn't matter if you reencode to MPEG2, divx, or MPEG7. That's why I said to add borders. If the border changes during the video, you'll break the luma pattern.

1211.5.2010 23:32

From the article: "The company says each frame has its own unique signature, meaning that doing any editing to the file or analog or camera copies will completely alter the overall signature of the original video."

From later in the article: "This technology is capable of accurately detecting video content with that was created with such editing operations as analog capturing (*3), re-encoding (*4) and caption overlay (*5), which was conventionally very difficult to detect."

There you have it...any small change will make the video have a completely different signature, yet they also claim that many large changes in the video will have no effect. I don't think they know what this does, and they only adopted it because they want to look like they are battling those evil pirates that post videos of birthday partys on youtube.

All you have to do is change the framerate from 30fps to 29fps and this protection is broken. Since most divx rips are 25fps, this technique is obsolete before release. You could also add a border, remove an existing border, or even just trim a few pixels off the top.

OR JUST PUT IT IN A 7Z WITH A PASSWORD...That is the ultimate protection, as it is such a pain in the *** to crack it that they just move onto the next file, like a car thief moving on to another car because your car is extra difficult to hotwire.

1312.5.2010 05:05

Seriously, when will these rtards just stop their futile attempts to quell piracy and just move on. We will ALWAYS be here. We will always demand it for free. And we will ALWAYS hack it until it meets our standards.

NEC, you are wasting your time. Do you not have anything better to do?


-adamryan

1412.5.2010 06:50

I still wonder why they call it MPEG-7...which isn't a new codec, but mainly just additional file/stream metadata. If they actually make a new codec after that, will it be MPEG-5 or MPEG-8? I know why they skipped MPEG-3.

This message has been edited since its posting. Latest edit was made on 12 May 2010 @ 6:56

1513.5.2010 10:08

Originally posted by adamryan:
Seriously, when will these rtards just stop their futile attempts to quell piracy and just move on. We will ALWAYS be here. We will always demand it for free. And we will ALWAYS hack it until it meets our standards.

NEC, you are wasting your time. Do you not have anything better to do?


-adamryan
Never!

You just do not get it. They make a living doing this crap. They don't care if it is useless and long as they get paid. It is the stupid media industry that thinks it can some how 'suck' money out of the public that isn't there. They don't get it and never will. Scammers always look for greed in their marks. It is difficult to scam an honest person/org.

For some reason the industry thinks if they can kill piracy they can extract 100K/yr from 10 yr olds. They claim trillions of dollars damages yearly. That money doesn't exist nor has it ever existed.

The surveys show pirates buy more than non-pirates. People will have a budget for entertainment. I do not think piracy alters that budget. What it alters is what your entertainment consists of to keep within the budget. Kids have been recording the radio since the invention of home recording devices. Now they can get high quality.
This message has been edited since its posting. Latest edit was made on 14 May 2010 @ 7:47

1613.5.2010 21:19

The way things are moving everyone is gonna have a Home Theater PC that can run anything you throw at it with the right software. That's what I've been doing for the last 9 months, and I love it.

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