ROBUST BLIND VIDEO WATERMARKING WITH ADAPTIVE EMBEDDING MECHANISM

International Journal of Innovative

Computing, Information and Control ICIC International c_{°2005 ISSN 1349-4198}

Volume 1, Number 2, June 2005 pp. 247—259

ROBUST BLIND VIDEO WATERMARKING WITH ADAPTIVE

EMBEDDING MECHANISM

Hao-Xian Wang, Zhe-Ming Lu

Department of Automatic Test and Control Harbin Institute of Technology

Harbin 150001, P. R. China

{ Haoxianwang, zheminglu }@dsp.hit.edu.cn

Jeng-Shyang Pan

Department of Electronic Engineering National Kaohsiung University of Applied Science

Kaohsiung 807, Taiwan jspan@cc.kuas.edu.tw

Sheng-He Sun

Department of Automatic Test and Control Harbin Institute of Technology

Harbin 150001, P. R. China sunshenghe@0451.com

Received August 2004; revised December 2004

Abstract. In this paper, a novel adaptive approach to spatial domain video watermark-ing is presented. It takes full advantage of both intra-frame and inter-frame information of video content to guarantee the perceptual invisibility and robustness of the watermark. An effective block classifier is delicately designed based on motion information and region complexity. Meanwhile, the idea of bitplane replacement is introduced in the embedding procedure. A major advantage of this technique is that the watermark can be extracted without referring to the original video while embedded adaptively in accordance with the human visual system and signal characteristics. The multi-frame based extraction strat-egy ensures that the watermark can be correctly recovered from a very short segment of video. Individual frames extracted from the video also contain watermark information. Experimental results show that the watermarked video appears visually indistinguishable from the original video, and the proposed watermarking technique is robust enough to common video attacks.

Keywords: Copyright protection, Digital watermarking, Video watermarking, Adaptive algorithm

1. Introduction. The great development of multimedia technology and computer

net-work undoubtedly facilitates the creation and distribution of digital content, but at the

same time it introduces a new set of challenging problems regarding intellectual property

rights. Conventional cryptographic systems permit only valid keyholders access to

en-crypted data, but once such data is deen-crypted there is no way to track its reproduction

or retransmission [1]. Over the last decade, digital watermarking technology has been

proposed as an effective solution to the copyright protection problem of multimedia data.