Fast and robust JND-guided video watermarking scheme in spatial domain

Generally speaking, those watermarking studies using the spatial domain tend to be fast but with limited robustness and imperceptibility while those performed in other transform domains are robust but have high computational cost. Watermarking applied to digital video has as one of the main challenges the large amount of computational power required due to the huge amount of information to be processed. In this paper we propose a watermarking algorithm for digital video that addresses this problem. To increase the speed, the watermark is embedded using a technique to modify the DCT coefficients directly in the spatial domain, in addition to carrying out this process considering the video scene as the basic unit and not the video frame. In terms of robustness, the watermark is modulated by a Just Noticeable Distortion (JND) scheme computed directly in the spatial domain guided by visual attention to increase the strength of the watermark to the maximum level but without this operation being perceivable by human eyes. Experimental results confirm that the proposed method achieves remarkable performance in terms of processing time, robustness and imperceptibility compared to previous studies.