Robust watermarking for resolution and quality scalable video sequence

Abstract

Due to the increasing heterogeneity among the end using devices for playing multimedia content, scalable video communication attracts significant attention in recent days. As a consequence, content authentication or ownership authentication using watermarking for scalable video stream is becoming emerging research topic. In this paper, a watermarking scheme for scalable video is proposed which is robust against spatial and quality scalability. In the proposed scheme, a DC frame is generated by accumulating DC values of non-overlapping blocks for every frame in the input video sequence. DC frame sequence is up-sampled and subtracted from the original video sequence to generate residual frame sequence. Then Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) based temporal filtering is applied on DC as well as residual frame sequence. Watermark is embedded in low pass frames of DC frames and up sampled watermark is embedded in the low pass residual frames to achieve the graceful improvement of watermark signal in successive enhancement layer. A comprehensive set of experiments are done to justify the superiority of the proposed scheme over existing literature with respect to spatial and quality adaptation attacks as well as visual quality.