A robust video watermarking scheme based on Laplacian pyramid, SVD, and DWT with improved robustness towards geometric attacks via SURF

Abstract

In this paper, a new robust and secure video watermarking scheme based on discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), singular value decomposition (SVD), and Laplacian pyramid is proposed for copyright protection applications. The main contributions of this work are: 1) Increasing watermark robustness towards common signal processing attacks by separating the watermark image into a high-frequency image and a low-frequency image using laplacian pyramid. Then, the singular values of each of the low-frequency watermark image and the high-frequency watermark image are hidden in two different DWT subbands of the original video frame. Separating the watermark and hiding its two parts in two different subbands of the DWT of the video frame makes it robust towards noise, filtering, and compression attacks. 2) Improving the quality of the extracted watermarks via correcting the received watermarked videos using SURF points when those videos are geometrically attacked, mainly by rotation, scaling, and shear attacks. 3) Increasing security and avoiding false positive problems (FPP) associated with SVD by using perceptual image hashing in the proposed scheme. Through experimental results and comparisons to other techniques, the proposed scheme has shown very high imperceptibility for the tested watermarked videos in terms of peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR). Also, the proposed scheme has demonstrated high watermark robustness towards various types of attacks, and an improvement in the quality of the extracted watermarks from 4 to 20 dB compared to other techniques.