Automatic estimation and compensation of geometric distortions in video copies

The proliferation of pirate copies of feature films on peer-to-peer networks arouses a great interest to countermeasures such as the insertion of (invisible) forensic marks in projected movies, to deter their illegal capture. The registration of pirate copies with the original content is however a prerequisite to the recovery of such embedded messages, as severe geometric distortions often occur in illegally camcorded contents. After a brief state-of-the-art in image registration, the paper details an algorithm for video registration, focusing on the compensation of geometric distortions. Control points are automatically extracted in original and copy pictures, followed by pre- and post-matching filtering steps to discard not relevant control points and erroneous matched pairs of control points respectively. This enables the accurate numerical estimation of an 8-parameter homographic distortion model, used to register the copy frames with the original reference grid. Such an image registration algorithm is inserted into a general video registration scheme. Results are presented on both natural and synthetic test material.