Streaming video and rate-scalable compression: What are the challenges for watermarking?

Video streaming, or the real-time delivery of video over a data network, is the underlying technology behind many applications including video conferencing, video-on-demand, and the delivery of educational and entertainment content. In many applications, particularly ones involving entertainment content, security issues, such as conditional access and copy protection must be addressed. To resolve these security issues, techniques that include encryption and watermarking need to be developed. Since the video sequences will often be compressed using a scalable compression technique and transported over a lossy packet network using the Internet Protocol (IP), the security techniques must be compatible with the compression method and data transport and be robust to errors. In this paper, we address the issues involved in the watermarking of rate-scalable video streams delivered using a practical network. Watermarking is the embedding of a signal (the watermark) into a video stream that is imperceptible when the stream is viewed but can be detected by a watermark detector. Many watermarking techniques have been proposed for digital images and video, but the issues of streaming have not been fully investigated. A review of streaming video is presented, including scalable video compression and network transport, followed by a brief review of video watermarking and the discussion of watermarking streaming video.