A secure digital camera architecture for integrated real-time digital rights management

This paper presents a novel concept of a secure digital camera (SDC) with a built-in watermarking and encryption facility. The motivation is to facilitate real-time digital rights management (DRM) by using the SDC right at the source end of multimedia content. The emerging field of DRM systems addresses the issues related to the intellectual property rights of digital content. The use of digital watermarking along with encryption for effective DRM is proposed. In this context, a novel discrete cosine transform domain invisible-robust watermarking method that uses cryptography and watermarking methods simultaneously to provide a double layer of protection to digital media is presented. The proposed method securely hides binary images in color image media and securely extracts and authenticates it by using a secret key. Experimental results prove that the proposed technique is resilient to stringent watermarking attacks. Hence, it is an effective method for providing protection of ownership rights. The corresponding application-specific architectures for invisible-robust watermarking and Rijndael advanced encryption standard (AES) towards the prototyping of the SDC are presented. The proposed architectures are modeled and synthesized for field programmable gate array (FPGA). The soft cores in the form of hardware description language resulting from this research can serve as intellectualproperty core and can be integrated with any multimedia-producing electronic appliances which are built as embedded systems using system-on-a-chip (SoC) technology.