Use of Human Visual System to Improve Video Watermarking for Immunity to Rotation, Scale, Translation, and Random Distortion

Abstract

A video watermarking method is described that takes into account the human visual system for processing color information to maintain picture quality better than a previously reported watermarking method. The improved method determines the watermark strength in the L*u*v* space, where human-perceived degradation of picture quality can be measured in terms of Euclidean distance, and embeds and detects watermarks in the YUV space, where detection is more reliable than that in the original method. Experimental evaluation using actual video samples showed that the improved method causes less degradation in picture quality and that, for the same picture quality, it enables up to 81% more watermarks to be embedded. Detection reliability was better for all evaluated transformations: random distortion, rotation, scaling, clipping and translation, and combinations thereof. This improved treatment of geometric transformations while maintaining picture quality will enable increased use of video watermarking.