Enhancing perceptual quality of watermarked high-definition video through composite mask

This paper proposes a composite mask based watermarking method, which improves perceptual quality of videos watermarked by traditional video watermarking scheme. The composite mask including noise visibility function (NVF) mask, adaptive dithering mask, and contour mask considers human visual system (HVS). The adaptive dithering mask solves the block artifact problem caused by expanding the watermark basic pattern for the robustness against various downscaling attacks. The contour mask makes up for the disadvantage of NVF mask, which cannot handle separately high textured regions and contour or edge regions. Extensive experiments prove that the watermarking method based on the proposed composite mask satisfies imperceptibility, robustness against downscaling as well as common video processing, and real-time performance.