A new video watermarking algorithm based on shot segmentation and block classification

In this paper, we propose a new video watermarking algorithm based on shot segmentation and block classification to enhance the robustness, imperceptibility and real-time performance based on the H.264/AVC codec. A method of selecting host frames is proposed based on shot segmentation to avoid embedding watermark frame by frame, so as to improve the robustness and the real-time performance. The watermark signal is cropped into small watermarks according to the number of shots in the host video, and small watermarks are respectively embedded into different shots. The watermarking capacity and the perceptual quality are greatly improved by this way. A method of selecting host coefficients is proposed based on block classification in the Discrete Cosine Transformation (DCT) compressed domain. The texture characteristics of host blocks are considered in the classification and the places of host coefficients can change adaptively according to the content of the video. The imperceptibility of the watermarked video is greatly improved by this way. The simplified quantization index modulation (QIM) is applied to embed watermark. It brings fewer artifacts to the host signal than the current main watermarking method, such as spread spectrum (SS), differential energy watermarking (DEW) and so on. The experiment results show that the proposed scheme has a good performance in maintaining real-time performance and resisting Gaussian noising, frame swapping, MPEG compression, etc.