Movie piracy tracking using temporal psychovisual modulation

Nowadays, camcorder piracy has great impact on the motion picture industry. Although some watermarking technologies can track the movie pirate, the video content viewed in the theater may be affected and they cannot obstruct the need of pirated movie because the watermarks in pirated moves are invisible. This paper presents a new method to defeat camcorder piracy and realize content protection in the theater using a new paradigm of information display technology, called Temporal Psychovisual Modulation (TPVM), which utilizes the differences between the human-eye perception and digital camera imageforming to stack an invisible pattern on digital screen and projector. The images formed in human vision are continuous integration of the light field, while discrete sampling is used in digital video acquisition which has “blackout” period in each sampling cycle. Based on this difference, we can decompose a movie into a set of display frames with specific patterns and broadcast them out at high speed so that the audience cannot notice any disturbance, while the video frames captured by camcorder will contain highly objectionable artifacts (i.e., the patterns). The pattern embedded in the movies can also serves as tracking information to reveal the one responsibility for the camcorder piracy.