Codes with the identifiable parent property for multimedia fingerprinting

Let \({\mathcal {C}}\) be a q-ary code of length n and size M, and \({\mathcal {C}}(i) = \{\mathbf{c}(i) \ | \ \mathbf{c}=(\mathbf{c}(1), \mathbf{c}(2), \ldots , \mathbf{c}(n))^{T} \in {\mathcal {C}}\}\) be the set of ith coordinates of \({\mathcal {C}}\). The descendant code of a sub-code \({\mathcal {C}}^{'} \subseteq {\mathcal {C}}\) is defined to be \({\mathcal {C}}^{'}(1) \times {\mathcal {C}}^{'}(2) \times \cdots \times {\mathcal {C}}^{'}(n)\). In this paper, we introduce a multimedia analogue of codes with the identifiable parent property (IPP), called multimedia IPP codes or t-MIPPC(n, M, q), so that given the descendant code of any sub-code \({\mathcal {C}}^{'}\) of a multimedia t-IPP code \({\mathcal {C}}\), one can always identify, as IPP codes do in the generic digital scenario, at least one codeword in \({\mathcal {C}}^{'}\). We first derive a general upper bound on the size M of a multimedia t-IPP code, and then investigate multimedia 3-IPP codes in more detail. We characterize a multimedia 3-IPP code of length 2 in terms of a bipartite graph and a generalized packing, respectively. By means of these combinatorial characterizations, we further derive a tight upper bound on the size of a multimedia 3-IPP code of length 2, and construct several infinite families of (asymptotically) optimal multimedia 3-IPP codes of length 2.