Video protection for MPEG-4 FGS with watermarking

The MPEG-4 fine granularity scalability (FGS) video coding standard offers flexible adaptation to varying network bandwidths and different application needs. This paper presents a MPEG-4 FGS video CODEC based watermarking scheme to embed watermark during encoding. Watermark is embedded into base layer, and can be extracted from both base layer and enhanced video through eliminating the influence of enhancement layer on watermark. This scheme eliminates error propagation caused by watermark for normal video, and utilizes error propagation caused by watermark adjustment to protect the video content. This scheme provides dual protection for intellectual property rights (IPR): watermark and video content protection utilizing error propagation in temporal motion compensation prediction. Watermark is embedded into I-VOP, and is adjusted before I-VOP is reconstructed as reference VOP. Only customers with authorization can adjust the watermark correctly during decoding to get good video quality. Illegal customers can also access the video, but with bad quality. This scheme has the virtue of providing dual protection with a little expense. Theoretical bounds of watermark embedding strength to keep watermark invisibility and of watermark adjustment strength to get enough protective effect are calculated. Some experimental results are given and analyzed.