A discrete wavelet transform and singular value decomposition-based digital video watermark method

Digital video watermark is widely used to protect copyright and content authentication. DWT-SVD based method, i.e., discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and singular value decomposition (SVD) based method, is one of the most popular state-of-the-art methods. There are two main criteria to evaluate it, i.e., imperceptibility and robustness. The former is measured via the peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity (SSIM). They should be as high as possible after the watermark is embedded. Robustness measures how easy to restore the embedded watermark by the owner even if the watermarked video is damaged by an outside attacker. Current studies randomly choose embedded positions for watermark, which hardly achieves its highest imperceptibility and robustness. In this paper, we propose a more imperceptible and robust digital video watermarking method than the existing one. First, we introduce a method to measure video frame distortion in a wavelet transform domain. Second, we model the problem to achieve the minimum video frame distortion as an optimization problem, i.e., choose embedded positions that can maximize peak signal to noise ratio. Finally, we evaluate and compare our method with the state-of-the-art approaches by using real experiments and show its advantages in both imperceptibility and robustness. (C) 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.