PhD defense Hannes Mareen

Since 2017, Hannes Mareen worked towards a PhD at IDLab, Ghent University - imec, with the financial support of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO). On Wednesday March 24, 2021, Hannes publicly defended his PhD. This is a recording of his public PhD defense.

Hannes Mareen's PhD thesis is titled Pirates of the Film Industry: The Curse of the Forensic Watermark.

PhD Thesis overview:
If you want to watch a movie like Pirates of the Caribbean, you can quickly find dozens of illegal versions on websites such as The Pirate Bay. Forensic watermarking offers a solution to combat such digital piracy. That is, legitimate users receive a video with a unique watermark that identifies them. When a legitimate user is malicious and they illegally leak their watermarked video on the internet, they can be identified using the watermark.

However, existing forensic watermarking techniques have three flaws or curses. First, they often lack robustness, which means that pirates can remove the watermark. Second, existing methods lower the visual quality. Third, there are problems with scalability: it is often unrealistically expensive to watermark in a system with a large number of users.

This doctoral thesis tackles these three curses. In general, the proposed techniques exploit the side effects of video compression. In this way, films can be protected in a better and more practical way.

More information and downloadlink thesis:
http://media.idlab.ugent.be/2021/03/2...
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00:00 - Welcome by the chair
05:27 - Presentation by Hannes Mareen
46:10 - Questions of the jury
01:18:44 - Announcement of final decision