Fast Video Watermarking in Sprite Blocks Using Mean Modulation

The distribution of digital media is becoming faster, easier, and requiring less effort to make exact copies. One of the major impediments is the lack of effective intellectual property protection of digital media to discourage unauthorized copying and distribution. In this book, a robust invisible watermarking system for digital video is presented. The proposed scheme provides watermark hiding by embedding a secret message (watermark) in the sprite area allocated in reference frame (I-frame). The watermark embedding process implies several stages to nominate the video regions where watermark can properly be embedded. Firstly, motion compensation is applied to assess the motion vectors of the blocks that belong to predictive frames. Secondly, the determined motion vectors are used for registering the motion history of all blocks in order to Identify the survived region (i.e., sprite regions) in I-frame. Thirdly, partitioning the detected sprite area into blocks; each of these blocks will be used as individual place for hosting one bit of the watermark message.