Robust video watermarking based on affine invariant regions in the compressed domain

This paper proposes a novel robust video watermarking scheme based on local affine invariant features in the compressed domain. This scheme is resilient to geometric distortions and quite suitable for DCT-encoded compressed video data because it performs directly in the block DCTs domain. In order to synchronize the watermark, we use local invariant feature points obtained through the Harris-Affine detector which is invariant to affine distortions. To decode the frames from DCT domain to the spatial domain as fast as possible, a fast inter-transformation between block DCTs and sub-block DCTs is employed and down-sampling frames in the spatial domain are obtained by replacing each sub-blocks DCT of 2 x 2 pixels with half of the corresponding DC coefficient. The above-mentioned strategy can significantly save computational cost in comparison with the conventional method which accomplishes the same task via inverse DCT (IDCT). The watermark detection is performed in spatial domain along with the decoded video playing. So it is not sensitive to the video format conversion. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is transparent and robust to signal-processing attacks, geometric distortions including rotation, scaling, aspect ratio changes, linear geometric transforms, cropping and combinations of several attacks, frame dropping, and frame rate conversion. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.