Reversible visible watermarking for H.264/AVC encoded video

Visible watermarked images and videos are generally used to convey ownership information. However, the visible watermark is generally irreversible and thus authenticated users cannot recover the original image or video quality after watermark extraction. This poses a limitation in various scenarios including military, law and medical applications. This paper presents a novel reversible visible watermarking scheme for H.264/AVC encoded video sequences. The proposed approach reversibly embeds the residual information that will then be used by the decoder to recover the original image. The residual information is losslessly compressed using the ZLib Deflector algorithm to minimize the information to be embedded. The compressed information is then encrypted using the 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). Simulation results clearly demonstrate the superiority of the proposed scheme to current state of the art where Peak Signal-to-Noise Ration (PSNR) gains of up to 7 dB were achieved.