Digital Watermarking of Raw and Compressed Video

Embedding information into multimedia data is a topic that has gained increasing attention recently. For video broadcast applications, watermarking of video, and especially of already encoded video, is interesting. We present a scheme for robust interoperable watermarking of MPEG-2 encoded video. The watermark is embedded either into the uncoded video or into the MPEG-2 bitstream, and can be retrieved from the decoded video. The scheme working on encoded video is of much lower complexity than a complete decoding process followed by watermarking in the pixel domain and re-encoding. Although an existing MPEG-2 bitstream is partly altered, the scheme avoids drift problems. The scheme has been implemented and practical results show that a robust watermark can be embedded into MPEG encoded video which can be used to transmit arbitrary binary information at a data rate of several bytes/second.