AN H.264/AVC HDTV watermarking algorithm robust to camcorder recording

With the purpose of copyright protection of digital video, this paper proposes an H.264/AVC HDTV watermarking method that is robust to camcorder recording. Because contents in the consecutive frames of a video are almost identical, we embed the copyright information by fine-tuning the luminance relationship of the consecutive frames. To ensure the quality of the video and the robustness of the algorithm, we use an adaptive watermark pattern to reduce the image area to be modified, and we make the embedding strength adaptive according to the improved Watson visual model. When detecting watermarks, to reduce detecting errors caused by recording errors and shot changes, we determine the detecting area adaptively according to the size of the watermarked video and segment the video into shots using the directional empirical mode decomposition method. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves high video quality and is robust to camcorder recording, transcoding, recoding, and other geometric attacks. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.