Digital watermarking in video broadcasting using a random walk method: Towards proprietorship

Establishing ownership of content is a burning issue in video processing be it on-line or otherwise. Here, in this paper, an attempt has been made to address the issue of proprietorship using the concept of random walk. While transmitting videos, it is natural that the videos are prone to various types of attacks. It may also be possible to extract watermarks at the competitors end. In this paper, a methodology is proposed in which the watermark is embedded in the video and moved according to random walk. With a random walk of digital watermark embedded into the broadcasted video it is almost impossible to capture/repeat the locus of the random walk of digital watermark. Since the locus of random walk of watermark is not known until the broadcast is being made and even during the broadcast the walk (i.e., moving of the watermark image) is completely random. The locus can not be guessed at the owners end, even. Translated into practical terms, there can not be any security breach between the host organization and competitors. This paper may not solve all the security issues, but nevertheless it is a feasible and useful step towards complete security, especially ownership. Standard wavelet transforms have been used in our work.