Designed system for the composition and protection of MPEG-4 and SMIL scenes and their multimedia content

Abstract

For the past decade, there have been numerous research works focusing on the protection of digital images, audio, video, 3D virtual scenes, and software data from unauthorized use and distribution. With the emerging technology of the MPEG-4 standard, many different media objects, such as images, video, audio, and 3D virtual objects, may be combined together to compose a given MPEG-4 scene. A MPEG-4 scene can be composed using the MPEG-4 XMT textual-based format or the MPEG-4 BIFS compressed binary format. Using the MPEG-4 XMT standard, MPEG-4 scenes can easily be constructed. XMT allows content authors to exchange their content with other authors, tools, or service providers and facilitates interoperability with MPEG-4, X3D and SMIL. In order for owners and designers to protect and/or authenticate their work, some form of security needs to be applied to the MPEG-4 scenes and its media content. This thesis presents the design of an MPEG-4 player that is able to compose or open a scene whether it is in the MPEG-4 BIFS format or the MPEG-4 XMT format. The scene can also be edited and modified with nodes or parts of the scene added, deleted, or translated in position with respect to the rest of the scene. All updates and modifications to the scene are viewed on the display scene graph. The MPEG-4 scene can also be saved in any of the desired formats whether the MPEG-4 BIFS for enhanced compression or the MPEG-4 XMT for ease of editing and modification. The thesis also presents the design and implementation of a novel robust algorithm for the authentication and protection of MPEG-4 scenes and their media content. The algorithm is applied on the MPEG-4 XMT-A scenes. Even though the XMT structure lacks the noise components, which are considered a vital part for information hiding in media objects such as image, audio and video scenes, the designed and developed algorithm still proved to be robust against many forms of scene structure modifications and tampering attacks. Even if a given scene is in the MPEG-4 BIFS format, it can be converted to the MPEG-4 XMT format and then checked for authenticity and any located copyrighted material. The design and implementation of a new algorithm for SMIL scene authentication and media content location and copyright protection is also presented in this thesis. The test results shown proved the algorithm to be robust against different scene structural modifications and tampering attacks.