A practical design of user specific watermarking in digital videos

A practical design of user specific watermarking for tracking possible pirated copies of digital videos is presented in this research. The information of a video recipient is represented by the watermark, which helps to trace the origin of video distribution when an illegal copy is found. A video streaming application is considered so the original video is assumed to be a compressed bitstream processed by such codec as MPEG-4. The watermark is embedded into the partially decoded bit-stream to reduce the computational burden of the video server. The blind watermark detection is adopted to ensure the feasibility. The Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) is employed to select interest points in scene-change frames for locating suitable areas for watermarking. The embedded watermark is designed to reasonably resist trans-coding procedures. The experimental results verify the claimed advantages.