Object watermarking for for MPEG-4 video streams copyright protection
Mauro Barni, F. Bartolini, Vito Cappellini, N. Checcacci · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2000
The recent finalization of MPEG-4 will make this standard very attractive for a large range of applications such as video editing, internet video distribution, wireless video communications. Some of these applications will need to address the problem of copyright protection. One of the key points of the MPEG4 standard is the possibility to access and manipulate objects within a video sequence. Thus object watermarking has to be achieved in such a way that, while a video object is transferred from a sequence to another, still it is possible to correctly access the copyright data related to the object itself. The algorithm proposed in this paper embeds a watermark in each video object in a way which is somewhat similar to that presented in reference one. A particular relationship is imposed between some predefined pairs of quantized DCT coefficients in the luminance blocks of pseudo-randomly selected MBs. Watermarks are equally embedded into intra and inter MBs. Experimental results are presented validating the effectiveness of the proposed approach.