A novel scheme for hybrid digital video watermarking: Approach, evaluation and experimentation

Abstract

We have seen an explosion of data exchange in the Internet and the extensive use of digital media. Consequently, digital data owners can quickly and massively transfer multimedia documents across the Internet. This leads to wide interest in multimedia security and multimedia copyright protection. We propose a novel hybrid digital video watermarking scheme based on the scene change analysis and error correction code. Our video watermarking algorithm is robust against the attacks of frame dropping, averaging and statistical analysis, which were not solved effectively in the past. We start with a complete survey of current watermarking technologies, and noticed that none of the existing schemes is capable of resisting all attacks. Accordingly, we propose the idea of embedding different parts of a single watermark into different scenes of a video. We then analyze the strengths of different watermarking schemes, and apply a hybrid approach to form a super watermarking scheme that can resist most of the attacks. To increase the robustness of the scheme, the watermark is refined by an error correcting code, while the correcting code is embedded as a watermark in the audio channel. It optimizes the quality of the watermarked video. The effectiveness of this scheme is verified through a series of experiments, in which a number of standard image processing attacks are conducted, and the robustness of our approach is demonstrated using the criteria of the latest StirMark test. © 2005 IEEE.