Implementation-Free Forensic Watermarking for Adaptive Streaming with A/B Watermarking

Abstract

Forensic watermarking enables the identification of digital pirates after they illegally re-distribute copyright-protected videos. For adaptive streaming, these methods are best combined with A/B watermarking, in which two watermarked versions are created for each video segment, and subsequently mixed in order to create a large number of uniquely-watermarked videos. Although good video quality and low bit-rate are key characteristics of a good watermarking system, existing methods objectively lower the compression efficiency. Additionally, they often require complex implementations. Therefore, this paper proposes an implementation-free, rate-distortion-preserving watermarking technique to be used with the scalable A/B watermarking concept. Even though the embedding is performed during compression, it does not change the existing video encoder implementation. Instead, it only changes the target bit-rate parameter in order to create different compression artifacts. These artifacts represent the watermark, but are not noticeable due to high-quality coding. As such, the rate-distortion performance is nearly equal to that of ordinary, unwatermarked compression (i.e., a BD-rate of 0.02% and −0.10% when applied with a H.264/AVC and H.265/HEVC encoder, respectively). Furthermore, the robustness is equal or better than state-of-the-art methods with comparable embedding complexities. More specifically, in case of recompression attacks, nonzero false-negative rates are only reported when a watermarked video is initially compressed with a high quality and degraded to a very low quality. Consequently, the proposed scheme can be used in practice by adaptive-streaming platforms without a quality decrease, bit-rate increase, or implementation overhead.