Drift-Compensated Robust Watermarking Algorithm for H.265/HEVC Video Stream

Abstract

It has been observed in the recent literature that the drift error due to watermarking degrades the visual quality of the embedded video. The existing drift error handling strategies for recent video standards such as H.264 may not be directly applicable for upcoming high-definition video standards (such as High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC)) due to different compression architecture. In this article, a compressed domain watermarking scheme is proposed for H.265/HEVC bit stream that can handle drift error propagation both for intra- and interprediction process. Additionally, the proposed scheme shows adequate robustness against recompression attack as well as common image processing attacks while maintaining decent visual quality. A comprehensive set of experiments has been carried out to justify the efficacy of the proposed scheme over the existing literature.

A Survey on Robust Video Watermarking Algorithms for Copyright Protection

“…To eliminate the drift error, many related algorithms have been proposed one after another [91][92][93][94][95][96]. On the basis of a past paper [90], Gaj et al [91] analyzed the intra prediction process of HEVC standard, and embedded the watermark into pixels that were not involved in the prediction process. In this way, the drift error caused by watermark embedding can be resisted.…”

A Compressed-Domain Robust Video Watermarking Against Recompression Attack

“…Considerable achievements have been made in many works [15], [18], [19], [22], [23], [28], [29], [32], [35], [36] on this problem. Mansouri et al [15] used number of non-zero quantization coefficients (NNZ) to determine the embedding area of the watermark, and adjusts the effect of the watermark on video quality through a priority matrix.…”

“…Gaj et al [28] embedded the watermark in the residual matrix of 4 × 4 luma transform block ( LTB ), and ensure the robustness by modifying the 3 × 3 matrix in the upper left corner. Dutta and Gupta [29] proposed a blind watermarking algorithm, which uses the spatio-temporal features of the video and a random key to select the watermark embedding block.…”

“…During the process of recompression, the change of QP will change compressed domain parameters, therefore, it is difficult to find the locations where the watermark embeds, in further to extract the watermark correctly. In [22], [23], [28], [29], [32], [35], [36], in order to locate these watermark in the compressed video watermarking schemes, they embedded the watermark in the specified locations. In these framework, since the detector or the decoder may not find the same locations due to the changes after recompression or imposed attacks, they used a location map or an embedding position template by private key describing embedding location which is used to find the specified locations where the watermark embeds.…”

“…In practical applications, the video watermarking scheme can resist recompression attack when QP increases greatly have more urgent needs and practical significance. The existing compressed domain watermarking schemes are that they are fragile against recompression attack when QP increases substantially [15], [18], [19] or they have security issue since they need location map when extract watermark [22], [23], [28], [29], [32], [35], [36]. In this article, we try to to realize blind extraction without location map to improve the security of the video watermark scheme as well as it has good performance on robustness to recompression attack when QP increases greatly.…”