H.264/AVC substitution watermarking: a CAVLC example

This work addresses the watermarking of an entropy coded H.264/AVC video stream. The phrase Substitution Watermarking is used to imply that the application of the watermark to the stream is accomplished by substituting an original block of bits in the entropy-encoded stream with an alternative block of bits. This substitution is done for many different blocks of bits to embed the watermark. This can be a particularly powerful technique for applications in which the embedder must be very simple (substitution is a very light operation) and a computationally complex, pre-embedding analysis is practical. The pre-embedding analysis can generate a substitution table and the embedder can simply select entries from the table based on the payload. This paper presents the framework along with an example for H.264/AVC streams that use CAVLC for entropy coding. A separate paper addresses the CABAC entropy coding case.