Active content fingerprinting: a marriage of digital watermarking and content fingerprinting

Content fingerprinting and digital watermarking are techniques that are used for the content protection and distribution monitoring. Nowadays, both techniques are well studied and their shortcomings are understood. In this paper, we introduce a new framework named as active content fingerprinting that takes the best from two worlds of content fingerprinting and digital watermarking to overcome some of fundamental restrictions of these techniques in terms of performance and complexity. The proposed framework extends the encoding of conventional content fingerprinting in the way similar to digital watermarking thus allowing to extract the fingerprints from the modified cover data. We consider several encoding strategies, examine the performance of the proposed schemes in terms of bit error rate and compare it with those of conventional fingerprinting and digital watermarking.