A brand new application of visual-audio fingerprints: Estimating the position of the pirate in a theater - A case study

Combating against camcorder piracy requires identification of the theater and show time information, followed by the estimation of camcorder location in a theater from which an illegal recording was made, in order to find out the pirate and limit the number of pirate suspects. State-of-the-art pirate position estimation frameworks employ watermarking techniques to approximate the position of the pirate in a movie theater. However, watermarks are fragile in nature and involve complex procedures, which may damage the video content. To solve this, a novel forensic tracking framework, which exploits visual-audio fingerprints for estimating the location of the pirate in a theater without embedding digital watermarks is presented. Precisely, the proposed framework first spatio-temporally aligns the source movie and captured video contents, then estimates the geometric distortions and consequently derives the illegal capture location in a theater by exploiting multimodal features. The case study results in the form of sophisticated In-theater experiments prove that, it is certainly possible to estimate the illegal capture location in a theater with a mean absolute error of (38.25, 22.45, 11.11) cm, by employing multimodal fingerprints. In this way, the proposed article demonstrates a brand-new application of video fingerprinting for investigating the location of illegal camcorder capture in a theater, which is applicable for digital cinema applications.