Fraunhofer IIS Setting The Pace In Transactional Watermarking

4-Aug-00

Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits, Applied Electronics IIS, the world leader in audio compression technology and home of MP3 unveils advanced signal processing technology - advanced watermarking technology - to help content providers keep track of their content and protect their intellectual property.Fraunhofer Bitstream Watermarking technology bundles Fraunhofer's robust watermarking scheme with their famous suite of high-performance audio coders by allowing direct embedding of watermark data (such as digital signatures) into coded music content. In this way, material can easily be personalized to any particular customer and traced back in case of illegal proliferation. This is an important step for the music industries and the secure digital distribution of audio files. Direct embedding of digital watermarks into coded bitstreams reduces time and cost efforts for the companies while preserving optimum signal quality.While Fraunhofer IIS-A had already presented the world's first bitstream watermarking scheme for MPEG audio coders at the AES trade show in Paris, February of 2000 (based on the MPEG-2 Advanced Audio Coding scheme), more brand new technology will be released at the upcoming AES convention in Los Angeles, September 22-25, 2000: MP3 support in the new bitstream watermarking technology now allows seamless and efficient data embedding for the de-facto audio coding standard on the Internet. ""The new bitstream watermarking systems were designed with two goals in mind - achieving the best possible performance of the combined codec/watermark system and maintaining the renowned Fraunhofer audio quality,"" said Christian Neubauer, in lead of the development effort. ""Much effort has been put into rigorous listening tests and optimization of the psychoacoustic models, taking advantage of Fraunhofer's long-standing codec expertise.""The Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits, Applied Electronics IIS-A, develops microelectronic circuits, devices, and systems up to complete industrial solutions. Fields of applications are information and communications technology, imaging sensor technology, image processing, X-ray and medical technology.The institute is also the leading research laboratory in the area of audio coding. Since the start of its audio coding work more than 10 years ago, Fraunhofer IIS-A has participated actively in the development of audio compression algorithms. Major parts of MPEG-1 Layer-3 (MP3), the most popular audio format on the Internet, have been devised at its headquarters in Erlangen, Germany.The MPEG-2 Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) algorithm, which is the most efficient coding algorithm currently available, was also developed in cooperation with experts from Fraunhofer IIS-A. AAC offers a 16 fold data reduction while maintaining CD quality.In addition to audio coding technology, Fraunhofer IIS-A is also working on data-hiding technologies for use in watermarking and fingerprinting systems. Fraunhofer IIS-A is active in international efforts to develop methods to technically manage and protect intellectual property, including the MPEG-4 work on Intellectual Property Management & Protection (IPMP), the Audio Engineering Societyís (AES) activities on ""Internet Audio Delivery Systems"" and the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) being initiated by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ) and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industries (IFPI).