A watermarking scheme for digital cinema

Abstract

In this paper a video watermarking scheme is presented, that is designed for the future digital cinema format, as it will be used on large projector screens in theatres. The watermark is designed such that it has minimal impact on the video quality, but still is detectable after capture with a handheld camera and conversion to, for instance, VHS, CD-Video or DVD format. In order to achieve the severe requirements, concerning visibility and robustness, the proposed watermarking system only exploits the temporal axis. A watermark is inserted by changing the mean of the luminance values of a frame according to the samples of the watermark. Watermark detection is performed by correlating the watermark sequence with extracted mean luminance values of a sequence of frames. A demonstrator, implementing the proposed algorithm, has been built which shows the aforementioned requirements can be met with the proposed scheme.