Annoyance Maximization for Digital Cinema Anti-piracy Applications

Data security is a major issue for digital cinema industry. One common way to pirate a movie called "screening" is to use a camcorder of a good quality during the projection, to record the movie and then share it on the Internet. Different strategies have been explored for resolving the problem of securing digital cinema content, some are based on temporal effects, others on colorimetric aspects. . The main idea is to insert a mark on the projected data that is invisible to a "normal" human observer but visible on the recorded data allowing to impair the content. Starting from this concept, it is very important to find a way for maximizing annoyance in order to make the pirate copy useless. This paper deals with a strategy for defining insertion maps that increase the annoyance and determining which type of content (text, graphics) is most suitable. So, we developed a method that takes into account the specificities of images and their content to determine such a map. We then managed series of psychophysical tests with a group of normal observers in order to provide recommendations to anti-piracy technology developers to maximize the annoyance dependently on the content of images.