A novel watermarking scheme with compensation in bit-stream domain for H.264/AVC

Currently, most of the watermarking algorithms for H.264/AVC video coding standard are encoder-based due to their high perceptual quality. However, for the compressed video, they increase the computational burden to decode the video, embed the watermark, and then re-encode it. Obviously it is a bottleneck for real-time applications. Conventional watermarking algorithms in the bit-stream domain can reduce the computation complexity but result in the error propagation and PSNR loss. In this paper, a new fast watermarking scheme with compensation in bit-stream compressed video domain is proposed, in which the watermark is directly embedded into the quantized residual coefficients. A texture-based perceptual model is employed to decide whether a 4×4-block is appropriate for watermarking or not. A secret key is used to decide the actual location to be embedded in a 4×4-block. With the proposed compensation method, the video watermarking scheme can achieve high robustness and good visual quality without much bit-rate increase. The simulation results have shown that a high PSNR is achieved with little increase in bit rate, and the watermarks can resist common attacks.