Scrambling technique for video object watermarking resisting to MPEG-4

The MPEG-4 video standard is nowadays more and more used for applications such as video editing, Internet or wireless video communications. This growing development has shown that these data must have a copyright protection such as watermarking. However one of the key points of the MPEG-4 video standard is the possibility to access and manipulate objects within a video sequence. And this particularity may have unfortunate consequences on many watermarking methods and may make them inefficient, especially methods which are not content-based. This paper presents a so-called scrambling technique which allows the adaptation of any classical spread spectrum watermarking scheme operating in the spatial domain to the MPEG-4 requirements concerning VO (video object) manipulation. This technique can be easily added to the embedding and detection schemes without changing the watermarking algorithm. Finally thanks to the usage of a spread spectrum technique and error correcting codes, an efficient algorithm for video watermarking is then proposed Our results show that the algorithm is robust to video object manipulations and lossy compression.