Real Time Watermarking of H.264 Video Sequences

Abstract

Digital watermarking is intended to protect digital media against unauthorized usages. The watermark is embedded in streamed videos for copyright protection purposes. In video streaming, the watermark embedding and detection time is the main concern. The distribution of the watermarking key is another important issue. The research aims to present a real time watermarking scheme for copyright protection in H.264 compressed videos. The proposed scheme is invisible, blind, robust, and preserves the original video bit rate. The watermarking process doesn’t require any key distribution. In this paper, a new H.264 model is introduced. The context adaptive variable length codes (CAVLC) blocks are statistically modeled. Based on the resulted CAVLC model, some of the CAVLC blocks are selected for watermarking using a user defined threshold. The watermark is embedded in the CAVLC block structure. In watermark embedding, the block’s total coefficients number (TCN) is modified. The simulation results show that, the average embedding and extraction time is zero. Moreover, high bit capacity is achieved compared to other work. The PSNR values of the watermarked videos are up to 40 dB. The embedded watermark is invisible, robust, and the embedding locations are totally hidden from the attacker. The detection algorithm is blind. Furthermore, the total file size is decreased by 8% after watermarking. So, the algorithm is more appropriate for internet applications.