A reversible watermarking algorithm with error-drift elimination in H.264/AVC stream

Reversible watermarking technique can be used to protect the copyright of digital video and restore it without any distortion while extracting the watermarking information. However, for H.264/AVC streams, reversible watermarking scheme has the bottleneck for practical applications due to the intra error propagation phenomenon induced by watermark embedding. In this paper a novel decoder-based reversible watermarking algorithm with an error-drift elimination module for H.264/AVC is proposed for eliminating the error propagation, in which the watermark is embedded into some paired-coefficients of 4×4 quantized DCT block. Our experimental results have demonstrated that a good quality of watermarked video with a small increase in bit-rate while keeping high embedding capacity can be achieved in the proposed scheme.