Spread Spectrum Watermarking of Digital Video

This paper reports on the development of an authentication watermark for digital video that is based on the principles of direct sequence and time-hopping spread spectrum. The watermark is identifiable in the presence hostile and benign intensity attacks. In addition, the explicit timing structure of the proposed watermark indexes video frames in such a way that re-indexing attacks, such as frame removal, insertion, re-ordering and alike can be spotted, quantified and even reversed. Watermark is defined as a 2D binary pattern that is spread out across multiple frames via a 3D spreading sequence. The spread watermark is shuffled into video frame sequence at bitplane level. The insertion order is decided by a multi-valued pseudorandom bitplane-hopping sequence that limits watermark placement to a range of lower significant bitplanes. Watermark detector is modeled after a de-hopped direct sequence spread spectrum receiver. We illustrate that the processing gain inherent in spread spectrum allows for the recovery of watermarks that are subjected to a broad array of intensity attacks from random noise to MPEG-induced distortion.