An illegal contents tracing system based on Web robot and fingerprinting scheme

As the multimedia technology advances, digital representation of multimedia contents has become popular. The characteristics of multimedia contents, which can be transmitted with high speed and copied without loss of quality, make more and more multimedia contents stored and transmitted in digital forms. However due to that characteristics, unauthorized copying and redistribution of multimedia contents is rapidly increased. For this reason, researchers have started looking for several techniques that allow copy control of digital multimedia data contents distribution systems, digital fingerprinting technique provides a good solution to avoid unauthorized copying. Digital fingerprinting is one possible application of digital watermarking. The owner of the distributor of the multimedia data can insert unique watermarks into copies for different customers or receivers. In this paper we propose an illegal contents tracing system on Internet by combining Web robot and fingerprinting scheme. In this system, Web robot traverses the Web and collects contents, and fingerprinting extractor looks for illegal contents. At the present time, a prototype system has been developed targeted to illegal images.