A Blind and Robust Video Watermarking Scheme Using Chrominance Embedding

Piracy of a digital movie is a significant threat for movie studios and producers. Digital video watermarking is an important technique that can be used to protect the content. In existing watermarking algorithms, robustness to several attacks of the watermark has been improved. However, none of the existing techniques are robust to a combination of the common geometric distortions of scaling, rotation, and cropping with other attacks. In this paper, we propose a blind video watermarking algorithm where the watermark is embedded into both chrominance channels using a dual-tree complex wavelet transform. Embedding the watermark into the chrominance channels maintains the original video quality and the dual-tree complex wavelet transform ensures the robustness to geometric attacks due to its shift invariance characteristics. The watermark is extracted using the information from a single frame without using the original frame which makes this approach robust to temporal synchronization attacks such as frame dropping and frame rate change. This approach is also robust to downscaling in arbitrary resolution, aspect ratio change, compression, and camcording.