Real-Time Compressed Video Watermarking in the VLC Domain

This paper proposes a compressed domain video watermarking scheme for copyright protection. In addition to common requirements of watermarking, the unique features of video watermarking such as preservation of bit-rate, compressed domain embedding/detection, and video attacks are examined. For real-time watermark detection, our method is directly applied in the MPEG2 bitstream. More specifically, watermarks are inserted into the variable length codeword (VLC) domain. We shall discuss how to select proper data in a video bitstream to embed watermarks while preserving perceptual fidelity. The power of our method is reflected by its robustness capability against attacks. False positive probability is analyzed to confirm our assertion.