Forensic watermarking is used to track down digital pirates after they illegally redistribute video content. Although existing algorithms often resist common signal processing attacks, they are not always robust against camcording attacks. As a solution in the state of the art, registration methods are used to align the attacked video to the original one. However, watermark detection still fails when the quality is sufficiently decreased or when exposed to targeted attacks. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel fallback system that aims to detect the watermark when traditional methods fail. More concretely, we demonstrate that a primary watermark embedded by a traditional scheme indirectly creates a secondary watermark signal during video encoding. This secondary watermark consists of compression artifacts and is detected by the fallback system. Additionally, the proposed system incorporates video registration to cope with camcording attacks. The experimental results indicate that the fallback system has a striking increase in robustness compared to the existing methods. For example, the observed false-negative rate for targeted attacks improves from 100% to 0%. Moreover, the fallback is camcording resistant even when the traditional method combined with registration is not. In conclusion, the proposed system can be used as a fallback when traditional detection fails.
Abstract-In order to protect videos from copyright infringement, a watermarking approach is proposed based on implicit distortions generated by a video encoder, rather than artificial distortions used in the state-of-the-art. These distortions are imperceptible and robust against video manipulations.
Watermarking enables the identification of digital pirates that illegally redistribute copyrightprotected videos. One of the main challenges is for the watermark to be imperceptible, while not increasing the video bit rate. Additionally, the system should be robust to attacks that attempt to remove the watermark. Therefore, this paper proposes a robust watermarking technique that does not degrade the video quality nor negatively affect the video bit rate. In other words, it preserves the video encoder's compression efficiency or rate-distortion performance. For watermark embedding, the quantization parameters are varied during video compression. As a result, different compression artifacts are introduced, although they do not distort the video more than those that occur during ordinary video compression. The collection of artifacts represents the watermark and is used for watermark detection. The experimental results prove that the proposed approach retains the rate-distortion performance better than state-of-the-art techniques. Furthermore, the watermarks are robust to recompression and noise attacks. In conclusion, the proposed method enables content providers to perform forensic watermarking without affecting the compression efficiency. INDEX TERMS Video watermarking, imperceptibility, compression efficiency, video security.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.