Fragile Watermarking for H.264 Video Stream Authentication

H.264 is the currently slate-of-the-art video compression standard performing significant improvement in coding efficiency and quality compared to other existing standard, such as MPEG-4 and H.263. The standard adapts a lot of novel techniques, like intra prediction, inter prediction and Integer DCT(Integer Discrete Cosine Transform), to exploits high operational complexity for reducing spatial and temporal messages. However most of the watermarking treat the quality of the watermarked video rather than the coding efficiency. Accordingly in the paper, a digital watermarking scheme is proposed based on the residual macroblock which is the residues between actual macroblock and predicted macroblock. Experiments show that the proposed watermarking algorithm is easily achieved and the watermark can be directly extracted at the decoder side without the original video. It provides a good solution for H.264 video stream authentication and the coding efficiency will increase accordingly.