Digital watermarking with local strength adjustment for AVC-compressed HDTV bitstreams

A computationally inexpensive watermark schema for MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 streams that use local mark strength adjustment minimizing visible artifacts is presented. The local mark strength adjustment mechanism and watermark embedding mechanism operate on residual data. This approach minimize the number of operations needed for video bitstream decoding and subsequent watermarked video data encoding. The experimental results included herein, described for real-world MPEG4 AVC/H.264 encoded HDTV video bitstreams prove its robustness to complex attacks, especially camcorder recording attack.