Robust high-definition video watermarking based on self-synchronizing signals against composite distortions

This paper proposes a high-definition video watermarking method robust against compound geometrical attacks by camcorder capture as well as common video processing such as frame-rate conversion and transcoding. Unlike traditional watermarking systems using the original reference pattern, the proposed method exploits the reference pattern estimated from the watermarked video. Since the reference pattern and watermark pattern are embedded in the same spatial position of each frame, the two patterns estimated from the embedded video are always in spatial sync. Thus, the watermark information can be simply detected without an additional synchronizing step, even if geometrical distortions happen to the marked video. Also, the problem of misestimation of the reference pattern caused by temporal video clipping is solved using the proposed two-pass detector. Extensive experiments prove that the proposed method is robust against various temporal and spatial distortions. (C) 2010 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers. [DOI: 10.1117/1.3488053]