Paper Info
Title
Robust drift-free bit-rate preserving H.264 watermarking
Abstract
This paper presents a novel method for open-loop watermarking of H.264/AVC bitstreams. Existing watermarking algorithms designed for previous encoders, such as MPEG-2 cannot be directly applied to H.264/AVC, as H.264/AVC implements numerous new features that were not considered in previous coders. In contrast to previous watermarking techniques for H.264/AVC bitstreams, which embed the information after the reconstruction loop and perform drift compensation, we propose a completely new intra-drift-free watermarking algorithm. The major design goals of this novel H.264/AVC watermarking algorithm are runtime-efficiency, high perceptual quality, (almost) no bit-rate increase and robustness to re-compression. The watermark is extremely runtime-efficiently embedded in the compressed domain after the reconstruction loop, i.e., all prediction results are reused. Nevertheless, intra-drift is avoided, as the watermark is embedded in such a way that the pixels used for the prediction are kept unchanged. Thus, there is no drift as the pixels being used in the intra-prediction process of H.264/AVC are not modified. For watermark detection, we use a two-stage cross-correlation. Our simulation results confirm that the proposed technique is robust against re-encoding and shows a negligible impact on both the bit-rate and the visual quality.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1007/s00530-013-0329-x
Multimedia Systems
Keywords
Field
DocType
Video watermarking, H.264, Perceptual weighting, Bit-rate preservation
Computer vision,Digital watermarking,Computer science,Computer communication networks,Bit rate,Robustness (computer science),Watermark,Encoder,Pixel,Artificial intelligence,Computer graphics,Multimedia
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
20
2
1432-1882
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
5
0.44
25
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Wei Chen150.44
Zafar Shahid215410.42
Thomas Stütz316516.74
Florent Autrusseau411112.94
Patrick Le Callet51252111.66