A CAVLC-Based Blind Watermarking Method for H.264/AVC Compressed Video

Streaming media services have been applied in many applications. At the same time, the security of it should be considered. To protect the video content, watermarking data (image) is usually embedded into the quantized DCT coefficients of video. At the same time, the watermarked video should keep the fidelity and the bit-rate. While for high efficient compression video such as H.264/AVC it is very difficult, because just one bit alteration may widely affect the video content and the bit-rate. A CAVLC-based blind watermarking method for H.264/AVC compressed video is proposed. The watermarking data is only embedded into the last non-zero and non-trailing AC coefficient in context adaptive variable length coding (CAVLC) of H.264/AVC. With this kind of embedding, the artifact due to the embedding could be reduced efficiently by CAVLC. Experimental results show that on average, the introduced distortion by watermark embedding is less than 0.5 dB, and the increased stream bit rate is only 0.1%.