Low-Complexity Watermarking Based on Entropy Coding in H.264/AVC

Young-Ho SEO
Hyun-Jun CHOI
Chang-Yeul LEE
Dong-Wook KIM

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences   Vol.E91-A    No.8    pp.2130-2137
Publication Date: 2008/08/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1337
DOI: 10.1093/ietfec/e91-a.8.2130
Print ISSN: 0916-8508
Type of Manuscript: PAPER
Category: Cryptography and Information Security
Keyword: 
blind watermarking,  H.264/AVC,  CABAC,  context,  

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Summary: 
This paper is to propose a digital watermarking to protect the ownership of a video content which is compressed by H.264/AVC main profile. This scheme intends to be performed during the CABAC (Context-based Adaptive Binary Arithmetic Coding) process which is the entropy coding of the main profile. It uses the contexts extracted during the context modeling process of CABAC to position the watermark bits by simply checking the context values and determining the coefficients. The watermarking process is also as simple as replacing the watermark bit with the LSB (Least Significant Bit) of the corresponding coefficient to be watermarked. Experimental results from applying this scheme and attacking in various ways such as blurring, sharpening, cropping, Gaussian noise addition, and geometrical modification showed that the watermark embedded by this scheme has very high imperceptibility and robustness to the attacks. Thus, we expect it to be used as a good watermarking scheme, especially in the area that the watermarking should be performed during the compression process with requiring minimal amount of process for watermarking.