Compressed domain based robust digital video watermarking scheme to protect the copyright

Abstract

Digital video watermarking is an effective way to protect the ownership of the multimedia contents. A novel compressed domain based digital video watermarking algorithm scheme is proposed by exploiting MPEG-2 structure. Watermark bits are embedded in DC and AC coefficients both of only smooth discrete cosine transform (DCT) blocks from selected I-frames in the original digital video. The algorithms never exploited entire frames but explore only three location from the subset of DCT blocks from the subgroup of I-frames only. This process maintains the perceptibility of the watermarked video. Two parameters, normalized correlation (NC) and bit error rate (BER) are used to evaluate the degree of similarity and dissimilarity respectively to check the robustness against image processing and video specific intentional and non-intentional attacks. The security of embedded watermark is enhanced by applying three cryptographic keys. The experimental results demonstrated that the better robustness and perceptibility achieved by comparing the results with the state of art.