Towards Fast and Robust Watermarking Scheme for H.264 Video

Most available H.264 watermarking methods either require large expense of time or are rather fragile to intended attacks. In this paper, we present a novel watermarking scheme, which satisfies with the requirements of both rapidity and robustness. The proposed scheme directly embeds watermarks into H.264 bit streams at the decoder by modifying the quantized DC coefficients in luma residual blocks. To increase the robustness while maintaining the perceptual quality of the video, we employ a texture-masking-based perceptual model to adaptively choose the watermark strength for each block. A crucial problem of decoder-based watermarking algorithms is error drift, which refers to the watermark error accumulations among different blocks during intra or inter predictions. To eliminate the effects of error drift, we propose a drift compensation algorithm by estimating a compensation signal for each block before embedding the watermark bit. Experimental results show that the watermarks are highly imperceptible and resistant to common attacks. In addition, our scheme is faster and causes less increase in bit rate than previous methods.