Blind watermarking scheme for H.264/AVC based on intra 4x4 prediction modes

Abstract

Digital video watermarking has been proposed as a scheme for copyright protection and content authentication for digital video data. H.264/AVC is a video compression standard that outperforms previous video coding standards due to its coding efficiency. In this article, we propose a blind watermarking algorithm for H.264/AVC video stream that is based on intra 4x4 prediction modes. Our proposed scheme is blind and original un-watermarked stream is not required to extract the watermark. Watermark extraction process is simple and does not require complete decoding of the video stream. Only intra 4x4 prediction modes are decoded to extract the watermark. One bit of watermark data is embedded in each of the intra 4x4 prediction modes. Mode selection based watermarking schemes are usually fragile and can be used for content authentication as well as for covert communication. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.