Robust Content-Based Video Watermarking Exploiting Motion Entropy Masking Effect

A major class of image and video watermarking algorithms, i.e. content-based watermarking, is based on the concept of Human Visual System (HVS) in order to adapt more efficiently to the local characteristics of the host signal. In this paper, a content-based video watermarking scheme is developed and the concept of entropy masking effect is employed to significantly improve the use of the HVS model. Entropy masking effect states that the human eye’s sensitivity decreases in high entropy regions, i.e. regions with spatial or temporal complexity. The spatial entropy masking effect has been exploited in a number of previous works in order to enhance the robustness of image-adaptive watermarks. In the current research, we use the temporal entropy masking as well to achieve a higher performance in video watermarking. Experimental results show that more robust watermarked video sequences are produced considering temporal entropy masking effect, while the watermarks are still subjectively imperceptible. Robustness enhancement is a function of temporal and spatial complexity of the host video sequences.