A blind and robust watermarking scheme for H.264 video

H.264/AVC is becoming a popular video codec for its better compression ratio, lower distortion and applicability to portable electronic devices. Thus, issues of copyright protection appropriate for this standard become very important. In this paper, a new blind SVD (Singular Value Decomposition) - DCT combined video watermarking scheme for the H.264 standard is proposed. The proposed method is a blind watermarking algorithm as the hidden information can be extracted without the original video and the original singular values. To reduce visual quality degradation caused by coefficients modifying, the perceptual model and block selection mechanism are introduced to control the modification strength. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated with respect to imperceptibility, robustness and data payload. Experimental results reveal that the proposed scheme achieves enough robustness while preserving the perceptual quality.