A robust hybrid video watermarking algorithm using NSCT and SVD

Abstract

The fast progress in digital techniques and internet utilization brought new problems viz. copyright protection and authentication of the multimedia data namely image, audio and video. The watermarking technique is widely used as a potential solution to address these issues by incorporating additional information called “watermark” into the data of multimedia. An optimal hybrid watermarking method is introduced by exploiting the properties of nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) and singular value decomposition (SVD) for uncompressed videos in this paper. The proposed video watermarking algorithm is an additive and non-blind, which necessitates the presence of every frame of original video for watermark extraction / detection. In this approach, the original video frame and the watermark are decomposed simultaneously by nonsubsampled contourlet transform. The singular values of each frame of original video are altered with that of singular values of corresponding watermark with appropriate scaling factor. Here, different watermarks are incorporated in different scenes of original video to enhance the robustness for attacks. Experimental results show that the combination of NSCT-SVD based hybrid watermarking algorithms exhibit a better imperceptibility and robustness to various attacks, namely, rotation, cropping, color to gray scale conversion, salt and pepper noise, and frame dropping. The performance of this method is examined with the existing watermarking methods, and observed a better performance in quality of video frame and robustness to various attacks.