Secure digital camera

A secure digital camera (SDC) or secure digital still camera (S²DC) is a digital camera that has built-in watermarking and encryption facility for real-time digital rights management.

Reasons for Use

Concerns about protection and enforcement of intellectual property (IP) rights of the digital content involved in any transaction are mounting. Unauthorized replication and manipulation of digital content is relatively trivial and can be achieved using inexpensive tools. Issues related to ownership rights of digital content are addressed by digital rights management (DRM) systems. Unauthorized access of digital content is being prevented by implementing encryption technologies. However, it does not prevent an authorized user from illegally replicating the decrypted content. Hence, encryption alone does not address all the IP issues related to DRM.

Digital watermarking is one of the key technologies that can be used in DRM systems along with encryption for establishingownership rights, tracking usage, preventing illegal replication, and facilitating content authentication. A secure digital camera (SDC) or secure digital still camera (S²DC) is a digital camera that has built-in watermarking and encryption facility for real-time DRM. While the software based DRM facilities primarily work offline, the SDC works in real time. In offline DRM systems, the multimedia data are first acquired, and then watermarking and/or encryption operations are performed before making the data available to the user. However, secure digital cameras have the capability to introduce security and copyright protection mechanisms immediately when the image is being captured. A system-level block diagram representation of secure digital camera is given below.

References for further reading:

* S. P. Mohanty, N. Ranganathan, and R. K. Namballa, "VLSI Implementation of Visible Watermarking for a Secure Digital Still Camera Design", Proceedings of the 17th IEEE International Conference on VLSI Design (VLSID), pp.1063-1068, 2004.

* S. P. Mohanty, N. Ranganathan, and R. K. Namballa, "A VLSI Architecture for Visible Watermarking in a Secure Still Digital Camera (S²DC) Design", IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration Systems (TVLSI), Vol. 13, No. 8, August 2005, pp. 1002-1012.

* S. P. Mohanty, O. B. Adamo, and E. Kougianos, "VLSI Architecture of an Invisible Watermarking Unit for a Biometric-Based Security System in a Digital Camera", in Proceedings of the 25th IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics (ICCE), pp. 485-486, 2007.

* O. B. Adamo, S. P. Mohanty, E. Kougianos, and M. Varanasi, "VLSI Architecture for Encryption and Watermarking Units Towards the Making of a Secure Digital Camera", in Proceedings of the IEEE International SOC Conference (SOCC), pp. 141-144, 2006.

* O. B. Adamo, S. P. Mohanty, E. Kougianos, M. Varanasi, and W. Cai, "VLSI Architecture and FPGA Prototyping of a Digital Camera for Image Security and Authentication", in Proceedings of the IEEE Region 5 Technology and Science Conference, pp. 154-158, 2006.