p2pnet - rss feed: Pirate alert: ‘We SEE you !’
p2pnet.net News:- Icelandic and French researchers are hoping Hollywood will buy into an application they’ve come up with to automatically track down movies being shared through online p2p networks.
An IRISA TexMex and University of Reykjavík Eff2 team has created a retrieval system it says can return high quality results from “huge image databases” quickly and efficiently, according to IRISA (Institut de recherche en informatique et systèmes aléatoires).
France’s Thomson Corporate Research is showing a keen interest and with it in the wings, in late December, Eff2 put a prototype through its paces to the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America).
“Image databases, and content-based image retrieval systems in particular, have become increasingly important in many applications areas,” say the two organizations in the Eff2 abstract, going on:
Moreover, new applications exploiting fine detail of images are now fast emerging thanks to recent and modern image processing techniques. While extremely effective (they return high quality results), these image processing techniques are very inefficient (they answer very slowly) due to their complexity and because of the inadequacy of traditional lower layers of software. This is particularly prevalent at large scale when dealing with image collections of realistic sizes.
The goal of this project is to research and develop new database support that integrates efficiency and effectiveness for modern large-scale computer-vision related applications and problems.
“Obviously, Thomson’s goal is to market a product out of this,” says IRISA. “The ensuing technology transfer contract could be three-fold: software transfer, some rewriting to meet Thomson’s requirements and probably a consulting aspect as well. Looming further ahead is the prospective of a more long-term partnership within Quaero, a mostly Franco-German project for developping new products and technologies for managing, searching and explorating large collections of multimedia documents.”
Searching images in large size databases isn’t easy, the post has TexMex’s Patrick Gros saying, stating the problem is, “database size-related”.
Typically, “in a photo agency, the size of stock can reach anything from 2 to 30 million pictures. An Internet photo bank like Flickr deals with 250 million images. And that’s just still photography.”
But with video, “you are talking billions of images,” Gros says.
So instead of comparing images and having them textually described, “we prefer to work on a digital description in order to apprehend its content in a tamper-resistant mode,” he states. And, “if you want to go into copy detection, you better know what you want to be resistant to.”
It might be a cropped picture, or an image from which the watermark has been removed, says IRISA, and according to Gros, “These things can be spotted.”
“Now, take in-theater movie bootlegging.,” the story adds.
A camcordered “pirate video features, “a switch from 25 to 30 frames/seconds, a trapezoid image and a significant change in colors,” he says. “These changes from the original can be described and spotted. We, at TexMex, haven’t work on theses video aspects. But it is a research field at Thomson.”
Stay tuned.
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Also See:
IRISA - Pirated Images Spotted Faster, January 5, 2007
Eff2 abstract - Programme INRIA “Equipes Associées”
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