A Hardware-Based Surveillance Video Camera Watermark

This paper arose out of a need for marking surveillance video in a simple manner that would allow the integrity of that video against later manipulation to be assured from the camera to the court room. We present a novel use of a video watermarking system. The system is based on an array construction method using seed sequences that allows a simple hardware-generated watermark to be inserted into a surveillance camera video stream in real-time within the camera itself. The watermark changes every frame, and it is possible to infer lost frames.