In order to maintain a high level of security in areas where vessel traffic services operate, there is a great use of industrial cameras, which transmit information to the VTS controllers. Two very important elements of the video image transmission are speed and confidentiality of the transmitted data. Currently, one of the major problems in front of such systems is to choose an appropriate method for safe image transmission that meets the requirements of speed and confidentiality. There is the possibility of using the tools of computer science known as fingerprints. There are two ways to protect multimedia copyright. First way is to encrypt the data. Encryption provides that only privileged receivers with correct decryption keys will be able to decrypt information. Unfortunately, encryption isn’t sufficient protection, because after decryption, privileged user may easily violate copyright by sharing decrypted data with public. Second way is called a digital fingerprinting, which rely on embedding of some additional binary sequence into image. This sequence, called a fingerprint, is unique for each receiver and it’s unnoticeable for the human eye. With fingerprinting there is a possibility of further analysis of a intercepted copy which is suspected of being illegally shared. The paper presents the theoretical basis for the use of fingerprinting methods to protect the media sent in VTS systems, as well as a description of the most promising methods, in terms of safety and cost, called Joint Fingerprinting and Decryption methods. Approach proposed by the authors can enhance the security of the video image transmission in VTS systems