BCH coded watermarks for error-prone transmission of MPEG video

Abstract

In this paper, BCH coding is integrated into a wavelet-based digital image watermarking technique. The resulting system is evaluated under an error-prone environment for MPEG transmitted video. First, a watermark is encoded by the BCH (31, 6) code. The encoded watermark is then embedded into each video frame using the watermarking technique. Next, the resulting frames are MPEG encoded and transmitted with 8.78% random macroblock loss in each P frame. In the proposed system, a simple temporal domain error concealment technique is also considered in the receiver end to reduce the visual degradation effect of transmission errors. MPEG compression and transmission errors can be treated as the attacking sources for the proposed watermarking system, and our simulation study confirms it. Error concealment may also be another attacking source. However, our experimental results show otherwise. In fact, the error concealment can slightly improve the robustness of the water-marking system. In addition, the experimental results show that BCH coding significantly enhances the robustness of the proposed watermarking system.