An adaptive video watermarking algorithm

An adaptive data hiding method is proposed that encapsulates forbidden zone data hiding in order to improve the robustness of watermark under the premise of ensuring the subjective quality of host video and the invisibility of watermark. The algorithm based on human visual masking characteristics calculates each block´s variance and energy and then selects the range of forbidden zone and the embedding strength according to two above values. This method is tested with H.264/AVC compression and strong common signal processing attacks, such as Gaussian filtering, to compare with the original algorithm. The simulation results indicate that the proposed method is more robust against attacks such as noise and compression and can be successfully utilized in video data hiding applications.