Video watermark detection in DCT domain for H.264/AVC through a hierarchical prior

With the advance of digital communications the distribution of video content has become common place. In this framework digital video watermarking can be a promising solution in a digital rights management system. H.264/AVC is a state of the art video coding standard and has been used in many applications. In this work, we propose a two-level hierarchical prior in the framework of intra-coded DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) coefficients in H.264/AVC video stream. It is well known that Gaussian, Laplacian, Generalized Gaussian distribution (GGD) and Cauchy distributions exhibit improved capabilities for the description of the empirical DCT coefficients. For the bipolar additive watermark in H.264/AVC video stream, the aforementioned distributions have been proved a base for improved detection algorithms. In this framework, the proposed watermark detection based on the hierarchical prior, deserves further investigation. Thus our simulation results show improved detection performance along with improved robustness against different attacks.