NEC has announced today that its video content identification technology will be supported in the upcoming MPEG-7 video standard, meaning content owners that release videos with the standard can “detect illegal copies” uploaded to the Internet almost instantly.
The company says each frame has its own unique signature, meaning that doing any editing to the file or analog or camera copies will completely alter the overall signature of the original video.
NEC says “these developments are expected to significantly reduce the time and cost of manual content inspections as well as improve the scale and accuracy of content assessment.”
Among the features of the video content identification technology are:
Accurate detection of copied or altered video content
Video signatures are extracted for each frame based on differences in the luminance between sets of sub-regions on a frame that are defined by a variety of locations, sizes, and shapes. Video signatures represent a unique fingerprint that can be individually detected frame by frame. This technology is capable of accurately detecting video content with that was created with such editing operations as analog capturing (*3), re-encoding (*4) and caption overlay (*5), which was conventionally very difficult to detect.
A high detection rate and low false positive rate for all video contents
By estimating confidence of signatures generated from each frame and using the confidence for sequence identification, the technology achieves a high detection rate (*6) with a very low false positive rate (*7). These technologies achieved an average detection rate of 96% at a very low false alarm rate of 5ppm (5 in one million) through tests conducted by the international standardization organization.
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Result for: content holders
A new proposal in Britain, taken up by the House of Commons today, wants to make it law that ISPs are forced to block access to all sites that offer unauthorized movies, music and other pirated content like games and books.
Content holders say the amendment will finally give them “the tools to tackle the piracy problem at the supply and demand levels,” says the NYTimes, but critics see censorship of the Internet and general undermining of the development of England’s digital economy.
The Open Rights Group, which has been fighting against Internet censorship, says the new law will certainly be abused, allowing individuals or companies to “suppress any Web content they find objectionable, under the pretext of protecting their copyright.”
The British government says curbing piracy will bring hundreds of millions of dollars in new revenue to the entertainment industry, which accounts for 6 percent of economic output, but critics say the policies will be expensive for the ISPs, and taxpayers will be forced to help pay for the enforcement of policies they couldn’t care less about.
Result for: content holders
The founders of the giant public torrent tracker The Pirate Bay are set to roll out a new way to browse anonymously, using a virtual private network (VPN), and have begun giving out beta invites.
Would-be users can submit their email address to http://ipredator.se/ in hopes of receiving a beta invite before the service goes public in April.
The service, when it goes public, will cost 5 euro a month, and will “allow the user to protect his Internet connection with encryption while “tunneling’ data in privacy through the servers of a VPN provider, usually located in another country. The user’s ISP-designated IP address remains hidden, revealing only a second IP address provided by his VPN company.”
Using such a service would effectively hide an individual from, for example, trade groups out to catch pirates and unauthorized file sharers and may also allow users to view videos on sites that are blocked in their home country.
Brokep, spokesperson and co-founder of The Pirate Bay, added that the timing of the release coincides with the launch of Sweden’s controversial Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED) which will make it easier for content holders to get personal details of suspected pirates.
Using the IPREDATOR service should allow users browse the Internet anonymously, and Brokep promises that the service will not keep any logs of activity, meaning if pressured by authorities, there will be nothing to turn over.
