Common Video Processing Research Articles

Robust transcoding-resilient H.264 watermarking

The H.264 standard is widely deployed for high-quality consumer video recording, storage and sharing applications such as Blu-ray DVD and streaming HD video on the internet including YouTube. In current times, since videos are easily shared live on social media and messaging mobile apps, users need the ability to determine the ownership of these videos against being illegally distributed without proper acknowledgements to the owners, and to take actions against those who spread false videos that trigger viral fake news. Robust watermarking schemes are popularly applied techniques to solve these problems. These types of schemes are required to achieve robustness against modification attacks on the embedded watermark. In this paper, we present the design of a new robust watermarking scheme for these purposes, namely that achieves robustness against common modification attacks aiming to change the watermarks embedded by the owner, and it is furthermore resilient to transcoding. The latter property ensures that the embedded watermark remains detectable despite having undergone the common video processing operation of transcoding.

Robust transcoding-resilient H.264 watermarking

The H.264 standard is widely deployed for high-quality consumer video recording, storage and sharing applications such as Blu-ray DVD and streaming HD video on the internet including YouTube. In current times, since videos are easily shared live on social media and messaging mobile apps, users need the ability to determine the ownership of these videos against being illegally distributed without proper acknowledgements to the owners, and to take actions against those who spread false videos that trigger viral fake news. Robust watermarking schemes are popularly applied techniques to solve these problems. These types of schemes are required to achieve robustness against modification attacks on the embedded watermark. In this paper, we present the design of a new robust watermarking scheme for these purposes, namely that achieves robustness against common modification attacks aiming to change the watermarks embedded by the owner, and it is furthermore resilient to transcoding. The latter property ensures that the embedded watermark remains detectable despite having undergone the common video processing operation of transcoding.

Video Watermarking Algorithm: Reducing Vulnerability to Geometric Attacks

Objective: This paper proposes a new integrated system based on a video watermarking algorithm with high imperceptibility, improved security, robust against common image and video processing attacks and geometric attacks. Methods/ Statistical Analysis: The proposed algorithm is based on the features of a selected best algorithm by Agilandeeswari and Ganesan and its limitations. The advantages of the hybrid transform techniques of Non-subsampled Contourlet Transform, Discrete Wavelet Transform and Singular Value Decomposition are utilized for high robustness against common attacks. Finding: The features of angle invariance and distance invariability of Log Polar Transform and Inverse Log Polar Transform are used in the extraction process only to resist geometric attacks without affecting the imperceptibility of watermark and watermarked video. Application/Improvements: Modified Arnold Transformation is introduced to improve the security of the watermark. The experiment shows that the algorithm is extremely robust in terms of image and video processing, temporal, common attacks and geometric attacks covering rotation, scaling and translation attacks along with high imperceptibility and improved security. Keywords: Geometric Attacks, Non-subsampled Contourlet Transform, Video Watermarking

Fast watermarking scheme for real-time spatial scalable video coding

Recent advancements in high resolution scalable video coding have significantly increased the computational complexities of watermarking solutions for real-time video encoding systems. This paper proposes a human visual system based watermarking algorithm for spatial scalable coding based on the H.264/SVC standard. The proposed algorithm extracts textural feature from a set of 7 high energy quantized coefficients in 4×4 luma INTRA-predicted blocks of all slices and embeds watermark into the highly textured block which has at least one non-zero coefficient in 6 selected locations. The same embedding process is performed for all layers of the video to improve robustness against common video processing attacks. Experiments were conducted by embedding up to 8192 watermark bits into a four-layer spatial scalable coded video. Results suggest that the proposed scheme produces watermarked video with an average visual quality degradation of ∼0.36dB at the expense of 2.18% bitrate overhead. In addition, the proposed watermarking scheme achieves an average detection rate of 0.98, 0.97 and 0.71 against re-encoding, recompression and Gaussian filtering attacks, respectively, using the base layer, and above 0.97, 0.94 and 0.66, respectively when using any of the enhancement layer.

Tampering Detection in Compressed Digital Video Using Watermarking

This paper presents a method to detect video tampering and distinguish it from common video processing operations, such as recompression, noise, and brightness increase, using a practical watermarking scheme for real-time authentication of digital video. In our method, the watermark signals represent the macroblock's and frame's indices, and are embedded into the nonzero quantized discrete cosine transform value of blocks, mostly the last nonzero values, enabling our method to detect spatial, temporal, and spatiotemporal tampering. Our method can be easily configured to adjust transparency, robustness, and capacity of the system according to the specific application at hand. In addition, our method takes advantage of content-based cryptography and increases the security of the system. While our method can be applied to any modern video codec, including the recently released high-efficiency video coding standard, we have implemented and evaluated it using the H.264/AVC codec, and we have shown that compared with the existing similar methods, which also embed extra bits inside video frames, our method causes significantly smaller video distortion, leading to a PSNR degradation of about 0.88 dB and structural similarity index decrease of 0.0090 with only 0.05% increase in bitrate, and with the bit correct rate of 0.71 to 0.88 after H.264/AVC recompression.

Robust Hashing Based Video Content Authentication

Nowadays, robust hashing has been widely adopted in video content authentication. The hash is resistant to common video processing operations, but vulnerable to video malicious attacks. Existing hashing methods to authenticate video, however, usually fail to make a good trade-off between robustness and security. In this work, a novel robust video hashing based on three-dimensional gravity centroid (3DGCbased hashing) is proposed for video authentication. Video frames are firstly normalized and partitioned on the basis of Hausdorff distance. Sub video cubes are generated from grouped video frames in both space and time domain. Then centroid of three-dimensional gradient are extracted from these cubs and quantized to form the video hash. During the experiments, parameters settings of the 3DGC-based hashing are discussed and the results show that the proposed method is superior to other methods in terms of security and robustness.

Optimized watermarking for light field rendering based free-view TV

In Free-View Television the viewers select freely the viewing position and angle of the transmitted multiview video. It is apparent that copyright and copy protection problems exist, since a video of this arbitrarily selected view can be recorded and then misused. In this context, the watermark in FTV should not only be resistant to common video processing and multi-view video processing operations (as in 2D case), but it should also be extracted from a generated video of an arbitrary view. Based on this remark, this paper focuses on this problem by evaluating the functionality and the efficiency of the watermarks and their corresponding Mathematical Distributions, in terms of “robustness” and “successful detection” from new constructed views of FTV, using Light Field Rendering (LFR) techniques. We studied the values which characterize the watermark's performance and the parameters introduced by the watermark's insertion-extraction scheme. Therefore, we ended up to the best five Mathematical Distributions, and we concluded that the watermark's robustness in FTV case does not depend only on the FTV image's characteristics, but it also relies on the characteristics of the Mathematical Distribution that is used as watermark generator.

抗几何失真的视频Hashing 算法研究

In this paper, we propose a robust perceptual hashing algorithm by using the shape of video luminance histogram. The underlying robustness principles are based on three main aspects: 1) since the histogram in shape does not depend on the exact position of a pixel, the algorithm is resistant to geometric deformations; 2) the hash is extracted from the spatial Gaussian-filtering low-frequency component against common video processing operations such as noise permutation, low-pass filtering and lossy compression; 3) temporal Gaussian-filtering operation is designed so that the hash is robust to temporal desynchronization operations, such as frame rate change and dropping. As a result, the hash function is robust to common geometric distortions and video processing operations. Experimental results show that the proposed hashing strategy provides satisfactory robustness and uniqueness.

An Innovative Video Watermarking Scheme Based on H.264 for Copyright Protection

A practical watermarking scheme for the copyright protection of video contents is proposed in this paper. The embedding and extracting are performed using the elements of the compressed bit stream. Watermark can be extracted blindly without original videos and complete decoding is unnecessary. Through the analyses of robustness, some appropriate subblocks are selected for embedding watermarks, reducing the declination of the visual quality. The experimental results show the proposed scheme can achieve good excellent robustness to common video processing methods such as low bit rate compression and synchronization attacks in favor of protecting the copyright of video based on H.264.

Perceptual video hashing robust against geometric distortions

In this paper, we propose a robust perceptual hashing algorithm by using video luminance histogram in shape. The underlying robustness principles are based on three main aspects: 1) Since the histogram is independent of position of a pixel, the algorithm is resistant to geometric deformations; 2) the hash is extracted from the spatial Gaussian-filtering low-frequency component for those common video processing operations such as noise corruption, low-pass filtering, lossy compression, etc.; 3) a temporal Gaussian-filtering operation is designed so that the hash is resistant to temporal desynchronization operations, such as frame rate change and dropping. As a result, the hash function is robust to common geometric distortions and video processing operations. Experimental results show that the proposed hashing strategy can provide satisfactory robustness and uniqueness.

Video Watermarking Scheme Based on MPEG-2 for Copyright Protection

Abstract An innovative practical video watermarking scheme based on MPEG-2 is proposed in this paper. By operating the compressed video data-stream directly, we embed watermarking information in DC coefficients of block image which is in the IDR picture, in DPCM process of MPEG-2 coder. Watermark can be extracted blindly without original images and complete decoding is unnecessary. The algorithm designs one kind of synchronization code in order to resolve the synchronization problem. Watermark information is embedded periodically for random testing. The experimental results show the proposed scheme can achieve good excellent robustness to common video processing methods such as low bit rate MPEG-2 compression and synchronization attacks.

Robust high-definition video watermarking based on self-synchronizing signals against composite distortions

This paper proposes a high-definition video watermarking method robust against compound geometrical attacks by camcorder capture as well as common video processing such as frame-rate conver- sion and transcoding. Unlike traditional watermarking systems using the original reference pattern, the proposed method exploits the reference pattern estimated from the watermarked video. Since the reference pat- tern and watermark pattern are embedded in the same spatial position of each frame, the two patterns estimated from the embedded video are always in spatial sync. Thus, the watermark information can be simply detected without an additional synchronizing step, even if geometrical distortions happen to the marked video. Also, the problem of misestima- tion of the reference pattern caused by temporal video clipping is solved using the proposed two-pass detector. Extensive experiments prove that the proposed method is robust against various temporal and spatial distortions. © 2010 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers.

A dynamic video watermarking algorithm in fast motion areas in the wavelet domain

In this paper, we propose a video watermarking algorithm which embeds different parts of a single watermark into different shots of a video under the wavelet domain. Based on a Motion Activity Analysis, different regions of the original video are separated into perceptually distinct categories according to motion information and region complexity. Thus, the localizations of the watermark are adjusted adaptively in accordance with the human visual system and signal characteristics, which makes them perceptually invisible and less vulnerable to automated removal. In addition, contrary to traditional methods where the watermark remains at a fixed position on the screen, the watermark moves along with moving objects and thus motion artefacts can be avoid. The multi-frame based extraction strategy ensures that the watermark can be correctly recovered from a very short segment of video. Individual frames extracted from the video also contain watermark information. Experimental results show that the inserted watermark is not only less perceptible but also robust against common video processing attacks.

Robust video fingerprinting for content-based video identification

Video fingerprints are feature vectors that uniquely characterize one video clip from another. The goal of video fingerprinting is to identify a given video query in a database (DB) by measuring the distance between the query fingerprint and the fingerprints in the DB. The performance of a video fingerprinting system, which is usually measured in terms of pairwise independence and robustness, is directly related to the fingerprint that the system uses. In this paper, a novel video fingerprinting method based on the centroid of gradient orientations is proposed. The centroid of gradient orientations is chosen due to its pairwise independence and robustness against common video processing steps that include lossy compression, resizing, frame rate change, etc. A threshold used to reliably determine a fingerprint match is theoretically derived by modeling the proposed fingerprint as a stationary ergodic process, and the validity of the model is experimentally verified. The performance of the proposed fingerprint is experimentally evaluated and compared with that of other widely-used features. The experimental results show that the proposed fingerprint outperforms the considered features in the context of video fingerprinting.

A Secure and Robust Object-Based Video Authentication System

An object-based video authentication system, which combines watermarking, error correction coding (ECC), and digital signature techniques, is presented for protecting the authenticity between video objects and their associated backgrounds. In this system, a set of angular radial transformation (ART) coefficients is selected as the feature to represent the video object and the background, respectively. ECC and cryptographic hashing are applied to those selected coefficients to generate the robust authentication watermark. This content-based, semifragile watermark is then embedded into the objects frame by frame before MPEG4 coding. In watermark embedding and extraction, groups of discrete Fourier transform (DFT) coefficients are randomly selected, and their energy relationships are employed to hide and extract the watermark. The experimental results demonstrate that our system is robust to MPEG4 compression, object segmentation errors, and some common object-based video processing such as object translation, rotation, and scaling while securely preventing malicious object modifications. The proposed solution can be further incorporated into public key infrastructure (PKI).

An analogue video interface for general-purpose DSP

This paper presents a real-time, high speed interface for the capture of live analogue video for DSP based video processing applications. The interface makes use of the link ports, which are standard features of general-purpose digital signal processor (DSP). Hence the interface can be used for the different DSPs with minimum customisation. Current technologies for video processing are either based on application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) or programmable processors specialised for video or video DSP as well as a hybrid of the above with a host computer. Such technologies come equip with software tools and application programming interfaces (APIs) to support a variety of common video processing tasks. Some of these may have support for analogue video interfaces while others simply cater only to digital video inputs/outputs. Unfortunately, the majority of video sources in daily life are analogue in nature. Video application designers are thus faced with the problem of finding a suitable simple analogue video interface for their applications. Moreover, for those designers who design their own video processing algorithms using general-purpose DSP to circumvent the cost and limitations imposed by these suites of standard solutions, the need for a simple analogue video interface is further underscored. The proposed interface thus serves to provide a simple, flexible, high speed and low-cost analogue interface to resolve the analogue video conversion problem and allow designers to concentrate on their DSP based applications. The interface can support both real-time and non real-time applications.