Video watermarking in the 3D-DWT domain using perceptual masking

A novel video watermarking system operating in the three-dimensional discrete wavelet transform (3D DWT) is here presented. Specifically the video sequence is partitioned into spatio-temporal units and the single shots are projected onto the 3D DWT domain. This paper focuses on the definition of a perceptual mask, derived from the 3D wavelet coefficients, which allows to trade off between the mark robustness and its imperceptibility. The proposed mask takes into account the spatio-temporal frequency content, the variance, and the luminance of the 3D subbands where the mark is embedded. The embedding is additively performed in the 3D DWT domain by weighing the mark through the defined mask. Finally, the inverse 3D DWT (IDWT) is performed thus obtaining the marked video shot. The imperceptibility of the proposed technique along with its robustness has been observed through experimental results.