Rate-Distortion-Preserving Forensic Watermarking Using Quantization Parameter Variation

Abstract

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.

Camcording-Resistant Forensic Watermarking Fallback System Using Secondary Watermark Signal

“…In other words, different compression artifacts are introduced during quantization of those neighboring blocks. This propagation of artifacts was also observed in previous work [10], [25], [26]. In this way, the differences propagate over the entire channel due to the predictive behavior of the video encoder.…”

“…Additionally, only few existing watermarking methods are robust against camcording attacks in which the spatial and temporal synchronization between the attacked video and the original video are broken [7], [8]. Techniques that were not designed with desynchronization attacks in mind often assume that registration is performed prior to watermark detection [9], [10]. However, even when registration is performed, traditional detection may not be able to cope with other camcording distortions, such as changes in brightness and contrast.…”

Fast Fallback Watermark Detection Using Perceptual Hashes

“…Future work should investigate if the proposed fast secondary watermark detection method can also be applied to other primary watermarking techniques that are based on similar underlying concepts. For example, it can be applied to other methods that represent a (primary) watermark as a collection of compression artifacts [19,22]. Additionally, future research could be dedicated to examining the performance of other perceptual hashing methods to perform fallback detection, and to making the fallback method blind.…”

“…However, such techniques decrease the overall security of the system, since the unwatermarked video will be temporarily stored on the client's device, and can thus potentially be accessed by malicious users. Some watermarking methods are applied in the loop, i.e., during compression [17][18][19][20][21][22]. These methods are codec dependent and still have the disadvantage that they require every watermarked video to be compressed separately.…”

An Improved High Capacity and Efficient Data Hiding Scheme for 3D Videos Without Distortion Drift

“…The emergence of intra-frame distortion-free data hiding algorithm for H.264 video effectively solves the problem of error diffusion and accumulation caused by embedded information, and reduces the impact of steganography on video quality [42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51]. Nevertheless, most of the existing algorithms without distortion drift embed the data into the DCT coefficients of I-frames by using the intra-frame prediction mode.…”