Recent Advances in Watermarking for Scalable Video Coding

The H.264/AVC (ISO/IEC MPEG-4 Part 10) video coding standard (Wiegand & Sullivan, 2003), which was officially issued in 2003, has become a challenge for real-time video applications. Compared to the MPEG-2 standard, it gains about 50% in bit rate, while providing the same visual quality. In addition to having all the advantages of MPEG-2 (ITUT & ISO/IEC JTC 1, 1994), H.263 (ITU-T, 2000), and MPEG-4 (ISO/IEC JTC 1, 2004), the H.264 video coding standard possesses a number of improvements, such as the contentadaptive-based arithmetic codec (CABAC), enhanced transform and quantization, prediction of "Intra" macroblocks, and others. H.264 is designed for both constant bit rate (CBR) and variable bit rate (VBR) video coding, useful for transmitting video sequences over statistically multiplexed networks, the Ethernet, or other Internet networks). This video coding standard can also be used at any bit rate range for various applications, varying from wireless video phones to high definition television (HDTV) and digital video broadcasting (DVB). In addition, H.264 provides significantly improved coding efficiency and greater functionality, such as rate scalability, “Intra” prediction and error resilience in comparison with its predecessors, MPEG-2 and H.263. However, H.264/AVC is much more complex in comparison to other coding standards and to achieve maximum quality encoding, high computational resources are required (Grois et al., 2010a; Kaminsky et al., 2008).