A blind and robust video watermarking scheme in the DT CWT and SVD domain

Abstract

The piracy of a digital movie is a significant problem for movie studios and producers but can be prevented by digital video watermarking. In existing watermarking algorithms, robustness to several attacks on the watermark has been improved. However, none of these existing techniques are robust to a combination of the common geometric distortions of scaling, rotation, cropping and downscaling in resolution with other attacks such as video compression. In this paper, a blind video watermarking algorithm is proposed where the watermark is embedded in the singular values of the dual-tree complex wavelet transform coefficients of the chrominance channel. As distortion in the chrominance channel is less sensitive to the human eye, the original video quality is maintained. The singular value decomposition is used due to the good stability of its singular values while the approximate shift invariance characteristic of the dual-tree complex wavelet transform ensures robustness to geometric attacks. The proposed scheme is robust to upscaling, rotation, cropping, downscaling to an arbitrary resolution, aspect ratio change, noise addition and H.264/AVC compression.