Every Thursday, the US Patent and Trademark Office publishes pending patent applications. Publication has no bearing on whether a patent will eventually be issued based on the application. Still, issued patents and published applications are often indicators of what people have been thinking about and the kinds of things that individuals or companies believe may be useful to them in the future. Both of today's applications address aspects of watermarking digital video.
Assigned to Microsoft, the first application discloses ways of fingerprinting video using watermarks. Assigned to KDDI Corporation, the second application discloses an electronic watermark editor for compressed video.
20070092103, "Video fingerprinting using watermarks," assigned to Microsoft.
Abstract
Video fingerprinting using watermarks is described herein. A watermark encoder embeds a watermark into an input video to produce a watermarked video. The watermark encoder can choose particular regions of the video that are sufficiently complex for watermarking. Spatial and temporal complexity analyses can be performed on a per-pixel basis to locate suitable regions of the video. The watermarks can be embedded using a unique codeword associated with a given user. A watermark decoder can receive the watermarked video. In some instances, the watermarked video may have been attacked in some way after being output by the watermark encoder. In these instances, the watermark decoder can extract the watermark from the watermarked video. In turn, the watermark decoder can extract the codeword from the watermark, and compare the extracted codeword to a plurality of known codewords associated with respective users.
20070092106, "Electronic watermark editor for compressed video," assigned to KDDI Corporation.
Abstract
The present invention provides an electronic watermark editor for a compressed video that can efficiently carry out editing such as deletion or rewriting of electronic watermark data. DCT coefficient values are extracted while applying all templates to video contents, and a template where a total sum of relative absolute value differences between pairs of the DCT coefficient values is maximized is judged to be an applied template. The pairs of DCT coefficient values extracted by the applied template are processed by a smoothing process section so that the relative differences are reduced and so as to reduce individual relative differences recursively until significant differences between the coefficient value pairs are statistically eliminated. In addition, the pairs of DCT coefficient values extracted by the applied template are replaced with new editing bits.
