Real-time video watermarking scheme resistant to geometric distortions

Abstract

A real-time video watermarking scheme against geometric distortions is proposed for DCT-encoded compressed video data. The full DCT coefficients have proven to be invariant to scaling and local geometric attacks. Therefore, watermarks are embedded into watermark minimal sequences (WMS) by modulating the low-frequency full DCT coefficients. To meet the requirement of real-time performance, a fast intertransformation is employed to construct full DCT directly from block DCTs. The modified differences of full DCT coefficients are inversely transformed to the differences of block DCT coefficients that are subsequently added to the original block DCTs to generate the WMS. To resist various video format conversions, the watermark detection is performed in spatial domain. This does not affect the real-time performance because the watermark detection need not re-encode the frames into compressed data, and compressed video can be easily decoded fast by employing some codec or decoding chips. Furthermore, the proposed scheme can resist rotation attacks by employing a rotation compensation strategy. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is real-time, transparent, and robust to signal distortions, geometric distortions including rotation, scaling, aspect ratio change, linear geometric transforms, cropping and combination attacks, frame dropping and swapping, file format conversion, as well as camcorder recording.