Seminar Announcement

Organizer: IEEE Signal Processing Society                                                                                                       
Title: Copyright Protection and Marking Techniques for Cultural Heritage                                              
Speaker:
Professor Vito Cappellini
Dipartimento di Elettronica e Telecomunicazioni
Universitr di Firenze                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
Abstract:
    Multimedia systems allow sounds, images, video sequences and texts to be combined in complex interactive documents, which can be stored in digital form and, thus, reproduced and transmitted over public networks. One of the most promising fields for the development of multimedia applications is certainly given by the Cultural Heritage world: new multimedia systems will allow the digitalisation of work collections stored in museums, galleries and libraries, thus providing wide accessibility to the public as well as a rich research source for schools and universities. From the point of view of content owners, the increased interest will encourage them to exploit their cultural assets in such a way to create new business lines and activities. Nevertheless, owners of cultural contents are unwilling to concede their multimedia data for distribution through public networks, since easy actions of copying and redistributing the works in their original form foster copyright infringement. For the wide development of multimedia systems in the field of Cultural Heritage, it is then important that robust techniques are designed to protect the rights of content owners. Copyright protection systems have already been proposed, mainly based on cryptographic algorithms. However, encryption systems do not solve the problem of unauthorised copying: once an authorised user decrypts the work, there is no more control on his/her possible illegal actions. A viable solution consists in indelibly marking the multimedia works to allow control over their spreading and use. A digital watermark is an identification code, permanently embedded into digital data, carrying information about the copyright owner, the creator of the work, the authorised consumers and so on. In this lecture the feasibility of copyright protection through digital watermarking is presented. To this aim, watermarking techniques proposed so far are analysed. Some specific techniques, developed with patents at LCI - Laboratory of Communications and Images of Florence University, are described. Their use for protection of digital images related to Cultural Heritage is shown, with particular reference to high quality images (having high space resolution and/or colour fidelity control). Finally a Virtual Contemporary Art Gallery developed in last years for Internet access, having copyright protection performed by means of LCI watermarking techniques, is presented.    

 

Time and Location:
Monday, October 1, 2001,  12:00 - 2:00 p.m.
Barratt Room
Galbraith 35 St. George St.
Toronto, Ontario

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