Robust, Hybrid Video Watermarking in Compressed Domain

With the rapid development of computer and communication networks, multimedia distribution through the internet has become very popular. As the internet is an open system, the transmitted data is easily duplicated, altered or even stolen, and the enforcement of multimedia copyright protection has become a challenging issue. Digital video watermarking provides the copyright protection of the video by hiding appropriate information in the original video. Since video signals are always stored and transmitted in the compressed format, it is unfeasible to initially decode the video sequence, insert a watermark, and later re-encode it. Further, there is no need to evaluate against the compression attack, if a watermark is embedded in the compressed format. Thus the watermark is embedded in the compressed format and the embedding must be performed in such a way that the added information does not cause degradation of the perceptual quality, and also it cannot be removed. While extracting the watermark, the focus is mainly on blind video watermarking techniques in which there is no need of original content.