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DPS: Smart Marks Technology

DPS: Smart Marks Technology

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SMARTMARKS™

SmartMarks™ are invisible, unremovable, and more importantly, imperceptible forensic “digital watermarks” embedded within every video frame to protect digital video from piracy. SmartMarks™ work with existing production and distribution technology to protect copyrighted material without requiring new equipment in the distribution or playback environment. Like embedding a forensics team inside your content, SmartMarks™ give enforcement agencies the proof they need to stop piracy.

SmartMarks™ are a modern form of steganography using video processing techniques to embed invisible, and effectively unremovable, secret data into video content.

SmartMarks™ are able to survive a wide number of “attacks”, including:

  • Video processing attacks, such as Digital-to-analog and Analog-to-digital conversions, re-sampling and re-quantization and common signal enhancements to image contrast and color,
  • StirMark” attacks, including resizing, letterboxing, aperture control, low-pass filtering and anti-aliasing, frame-swapping, compression, scaling, cropping, overwriting, the addition of noise and other transformations,
  • Collusion, which is the combining of multiple videos in the attempt remove the SmartMark,
  • Attempts at sync separation, the cutting off or damaging of the horizontal and vertical sync signals that are embedded into a composite (analog) video as well as into a digital video stream,
  • Format conversion, the changing of frequencies and spatial resolution among NTSC, PAL, and SECAM.

Effectively, these watermarks cannot be removed without destroying the video content itself, thus rendering any effort at video piracy ineffective.

SmartMarks™ Example

ovt-sm-original-2

Displayed is an original sample pre (SmartMarks™) watermarking video frame image.

ovt-sm-invisiblewatermarks-2

Shown, is the same post (SmartMarks™) watermaked actual sample video frame image. Note: SmartMarks™ watermarks are imperceptible and add no additional payload data (i.e. no additional information or increase to actual video content).

ovt-sm-visiblewatermarks-2

Shown is the same actual sample video frame image, with amplified (exaggerated) “visible” (SmartMarks™) watermarking particles.