Robust video watermarking for wireless multimedia communications

Digital watermarking involves embedding copyright marks (watermarks ), often imperceptibly, in multimedia objects to enhance or protect their value. In this paper we describe a novel watermarking algorithm suitable for video coding techniques such as MPEG-4 and H.2631.324 and we test it in a wireless environment. The proposed algorithm satisfies critical properties not all of which are available in previous solutions. These properties include: Resistance (robustness) of the embedded watermark to the error-prone nature of wireless channels as well as to video frame loss or misplacement, negligible probability of reading a non embedded watermark, non-degradation of the marked video sequence and the possibility to mark video objects (e.g., MPEG-4 objects) in a single frame separately. Experimental results are given that show how these and other properties are achieved when video sequences are corrupted with errors that are typical of a wireless channel.