Enhancing Invisibility and Robustness of DWT based Video Watermarking scheme for Copyright Protection

Abstract

Requirements for digital watermarking are mainly application dependent. Robustness is one of the main requirements for many watermarking applications. In this paper a blind discrete wavelet transform (DWT) based video watermarking algorithm for copyright protection is proposed. We have embedded a meaningful watermark invisibly into uncompressed video. The watermark is embedded in high frequency sub-band coefficients of the DWT to improve the invisibility of the marked video sequence. The watermark is first scrambled and then encoded to minimize the error probabilities during watermark detection. We have applied 2-D automorphic transform and BCH error correction coding on the binary image for scrambling and encoding the watermark respectively before the watermark embedding. We have applied key based pseudo random 3-D interleaving on the coefficients selected for watermark insertion. We have also embedded the frame number as the synchronization information instead of using the sliding correlation as proposed in [1, 5]. Experimental results have proved that the embedded data with the proposed scheme is visually transparent, robust against unintentional or malicious attacks such as frames deleting, frames inserting and frame statistical averaging. 3-D interleaving has significantly improved the robustness of the proposed scheme against temporal attacks. The watermark embedded in such way is high bit rate and thus more robust. The series of experiments conducted has revealed the effectiveness and usefulness of the proposed watermark generation and embedding strategy.