Towards joint decoding of Tardos fingerprinting codes

The class of joint decoder of probabilistic fingerprinting codes is of utmost importance in theoretical papers to establish the concept of fingerprint capacity [1]–[3]. However, no implementation supporting a large user base is known to date. This paper presents an iterative decoder which is, as far as we are aware of, the first practical attempt towards joint decoding. The discriminative feature of the scores benefits on one hand from the side-information of previously accused users, and on the other hand, from recently introduced universal linear decoders for compound channels [4]. Neither the code construction nor the decoder make precise assumptions about the collusion (size or strategy). The extension to incorporate soft outputs from the watermarking layer is straightforward. An intensive experimental work benchmarks the very good performances and offers a clear comparison with previous state-of-the-art decoders.