Watermarking of Compressed Video based on DCT Coefficients and Watermark Preprocessing

Abstract

Considering the importance of watermarking of compressed video, several watermarking methods have been proposed for authentication, copyrights protection or simply for a secure data carrying through the Internet. Applied to the H.264/AVC video standard, in most of cases, these methods are based on the use of the quantized DCT coefficients often experimentally or randomly selected. In this paper, we introduce a watermarking method based on the DCT coefficients using two steps: the first one consists in a watermark pre-processing based on similarity measurement which can allow to adapt the best the watermark to the carrying coefficients of low frequencies. A second step takes advantage from the coefficients of high frequencies in order to maintain the video quality and reduce the bitrate. Results show that it is possible to achieve a very good compromise between video quality, embedding capacity and bitrate.