A robust compressed domain video watermarking in P-frames with controlled bit rate increase

Abstract

In recent years video watermarking has become an important research issue due to increase in threats of video piracy, content authentication, and ownership integrity. In this paper, we propose a robust watermarking method with the blind extraction process for compressed video streams like H.264/AVC. The method embeds invisible watermark bits into the P-frames. Appropriate block selection and the embedding algorithm restrict the increase in video bit rate. The security of the method lies in selecting candidate blocks using a pseudo random key from set of previously selected blocks. The simulation results show that the proposed method is robust against common image and video watermarking attacks. A robust watermark is generated in order to withstand frame drop and insert attacks, which increases the overall robustness of the proposed method.