Real-time video watermarking on programmable graphics hardware

In this paper, we propose a real-time video watermarking system on programmable graphics hardware. Real-time video watermarking is important to the use of digital video in legal proceedings, security surveillance, new reportage and commercial video transactions. The watermarking scheme implemented here is based on Wong's scheme for image watermarking, and is designed to detect and localize any change in the pixels of any frame of the incoming video stream. We implement this scheme for real-time operation on programmable graphics hardware. The graphics processing units (GPUs) found on many modern commodity-level graphics cards have the ability to execute application-defined sequences of instructions on not only geometric primitives, defined by vertices, but also on image or texture fragments mapped to rasterized geometric primitives. These fragment programs, also known as fragment or pixel shaders, execute in hardware and in parallel on the GPU for each fragment, or pixel, that is rendered, making the GPU well suited for image and video processing. We illustrate real-time performance, low perceptibility, and good bit-error rates and localization by way of a general testing framework that allows straightforward testing of any video watermarking system implemented on programmable graphics hardware.