Adding robustness to geometrical attacks to a wavelet based, blind video watermarking system

This paper describes a high capacity blind video watermarking system invariant to geometrical attacks such as shift, rotation, scaling and cropping. A spatial domain reference watermark is used to obtain invariance to geometric attacks by employing image registration techniques to determine and invert the attacks. A second, high capacity, watermark, which carries the data payload, is embedded in the wavelet domain according to a human visual system (HVS) model. This is protected by a state-of-the-art error correction code (turbo code). For a false detection probability of 10^-8, the proposed system is invariant to scaling up to 180%, rotation up to 70°, and arbitrary aspect ratio changes up to 200% on both axes. Furthermore, the system is virtually invariant to any shifting, cropping, or combined shifting and cropping attack, and it is robust to MPEG-2 compression as low as 2-3 Mbps.