A Low Complexity Video Watermarking in H.264 Compressed Domain

In this paper, a new blind and readable H.264 compressed domain watermarking scheme is proposed in which the embedding/extracting is performed using the syntactic elements of the compressed bit stream. As a result, it is not necessary to fully decode a compressed video stream both in the embedding and extracting processes. The method also presents an inexpensive spatiotemporal analysis that selects the appropriate submacroblocks for embedding, increasing watermark robustness while reducing its impact on visual quality. Meanwhile, the proposed method prevents bit-rate increase and restricts it within an acceptable limit by selecting appropriate quantized residuals for watermark insertion. Regarding watermarking demands such as imperceptibility, bit-rate control, and appropriate level of security, a priority matrix is defined which can be adjusted based on the application requirements. The resulted flexibility expands the usability of the proposed method.