A New Uncompressed-Domain Video Watermarking Approach Robust to H.264/AVC Compression

In this paper, we present a new video watermarking approach which is robust to efficient video coding standards such as H.264/AVC. We show the contradiction between embedding watermarks in the irrelevant part of a video and using a lossy compression algorithm to reduce the video data rate. Because the compression algorithm removes irrelevant information, the watermark can not be recovered. To solve this problem, we propose the embedding of the watermark in the relevant part of the video but in an imperceptible manner. We realize this by changing the spatial position of object borders. We propose our new Normed Centre of Gravity (NCG) to describe these borders. Of course, lossy compression influences the NCG. We present a method to predict the strength of this influence. Hence, we can embed the watermark with a defined robustness to lossy compression. The watermarking is embedded by quantizing the NCG. We present a geometric warping process to quantize the NCG and embed the watermark payload with a defined robustness. To demonstrate the robustness we use the new and at present most efficient available compression standard H.264/AVC.