Abstract
Field of image and video processing has got lot of attention during the last two decades. This field now covers a vast spectrum of applications like 3D TV, tele-surveillance, computer vision, medical imaging, compression, transmission and much more. Of particular interest is the revolution being witnessed by the first decade of twenty-first century. Network bandwidths, memory capacities and computing efficiencies have got revolutionized during this period. One client may have a 100~mbps connection whereas the other may be using a 56~kbps dial up modem. Simultaneously, one client may have a powerful workstation while others may have just a smart-phone. In between these extremes, there may be thousands of clients with varying capabilities and needs. Moreover, the preferences of a client may adapt to his capacity, e.g. a client handicapped by bandwidth may be more interested in real-time visualization without interruption than in high resolution. To cope with it, scalable architectures of video codecs have been introduced to 'compress once, decompress many ways' paradigm. Since DCT lacks the multi-resolution functionality, a scalable video architecture is designed to cope with challenges of heterogeneous nature of bandwidth and processing power. With the inundation of digital content, which can be easily copied and modified, the need for protection of video content has got attention. Video protection can be materialized with help of three technologies: watermarking for meta data and copyright insertion, encryption to restrict access to authorized persons, and active fingerprinting for traitor tracing. The main idea in our work is to make the protection technology transparent to the user. This would thus result in a modified video codec which will be capable of encoding and playing a protected bitstream. Since scalable multimedia content has already started coming to the market, algorithms for independent protection of enhancement layers are also proposed.