H.264/AVC video watermarking for active fingerprinting based on Tardos code

In this paper, we present a novel approach for active fingerprinting of state-of-the-art video codec H.264/AVC. Tardos probabilistic fingerprinting code is embedded in H.264/AVC video signals using spread spectrum watermarking technique in both luma and chroma. Tardos code is embedded in intra as well as inter frames. The embedding has been performed in the nonzero quantized transformed coefficients, which are above a certain threshold while taking into account the reconstruction loop, to avoid the uncontrollable increase in bitrate of video bitstream. A comprehensive analysis of payload and PSNR trade-off is presented for the benchmark video sequences. Different linear and nonlinear collusion attacks have been performed in the pixel domain to show the robustness of the proposed approach.