Low-Complexity Watermarking into SAO Offsets for HEVC Videos

Abstract

This paper proposes a new watermarking algorithm to embed watermarks in thr process of sample adaptive offsets (SAO) for high efficiency video coding (HEVC) compressed videos. The proposed method embeds two-bit watermark into the SAO offsets for each coding tree unit (CTU). To minimize visual quality degradation caused by embedding watermark, watermark bits are embedded into SAO offset depending on the SAO types of block. Furthermore, the embedded watermark can be extracted by simply adding four offsets and checking their least significant bits (LSB) at the decoder side. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves 0.3% BD-rate increase without much visual quality degradation. Two-bit watermark for each CTU is embedded for more bit watermarking. In addition, the proposed method requires negligible computational load for watermark insertion and extraction.