Direct sequence watermarking of digital video using m-frames

In this work we apply a direct sequence spread spectrum model to the watermarking of digital video. First, the video signal is modeled as a sequence of bit planes arranged along the time axis. Watermarking of this sequence is a two layer operation. A controlling m-sequence first establishes a pseudorandom order in the bitplane stream for later watermarking. Watermarks, defined as m-frames, supplant the tagged bitplanes. We have shown that the watermark, when limited to the 4 lowest bitplanes of an 8-bit video, are unnoticeable. Moreover, attempts in corrupting the image to destroy the watermark renders the video useless before damaging the seal itself. The watermarked video is also robust to video editing attempts such as subsampling, frame reordering etc. The watermark is also identifiable from very short segments of video. Individual frames extracted from the video will also contain copyright information.