Discrete wavelet transform-based spatial-temporal approach for quantized video watermarking

We propose a new public digital watermarking technique for video copyright protection working in the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) domain. The proposed scheme is a combination of spread-spectrum and quantization-based watermarking. The proposed scheme is characterized by two achievements: (i) a spread-spectrum technique is used to spread the power spectrum of the watermark data and (ii) an error correction code is applied and embeds the watermark with spatial and temporal redundancy. The goal of these two achievements is to increase robustness against attacks, protect the watermark against bit errors, and achieve a very good perceptual quality. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is verified through a series of experiments in which a number of video and standard image-processing attacks are conducted. The proposed scheme achieves a very good perceptual quality with mean peak signal-to-noise-ratio values of the watermarked videos of >40 dB and high resistance to a large spectrum of attacks. (C) 2011 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). [DOI: 10.1117/1.3596601]