Copyright protection of synthesized objects: a geometric interpretation

Yi-Wen Liu $<$jacobliu at stanford$>$ (EE)

Synthesized multimedia objects are emerging everywhere now. One can talk on the phone to a virtual representative that speaks a synthesized tongue, drink soda of synthesized taste, such as Coke, or even fall in love with Simone, a synthesized character. It becomes urgent to protect such objects as intelectual properties, for the synthesis of them often involves a lot of computation power and human hours. This talk presents a mathematical definition of the term synthesis, and aims to provide a framework for the design of robust watermarking algorithms to, hopefully, protect copyrights to synthesized objects. In particular, this talk proposes a strategy of watermarking before synthesis, and presents a geometric method to evaluate its robustness to random attacks.

• PART I: INTRODUCTION
  • Synthesized multimedia objects: creation and distribution
  • A mathematical definition of synthesis
  • A mathematical formulation of the watermarking game
  • A review of the duality between audio watermarking and audio coding Copyright protection by watermarking before synthesis (WBS)

• PART II: ANALYSIS
  • A simple case study - protecting single-tone cell phone ringers
  • Problem formulation - frequency estimation under Gaussian white attacks
  • Solving the problem by designing a robust frequency estimator
  • The Marti Gras beads(MGB) geometric interpretation
  • Calculating the Cramér-Rao bounds (CRB)
  • Generalization to $K$ dimensional manifold MGB interpretation
  • Calculation of variance of parameter estimation error based on $K$-manifold MGB interpretation
  • Comparing the MGB variance and CRB

• PART III: POSSIBLE FUTURE DIRECTIONS More case studies - e.g., non-stationary sinusoids, synthesized speech, new music by physical modeling
  • Customizing WBS according to various types of anticipated attacks
  • Vector quantization on manifolds
  • Adaptive learning on manifolds