Watermarking compressed video stream over Internet

As Internet is gaining popularity day by day throughout the globe, it has become necessary to protect the copyright ownership of multimedia data distributing in Internet. The technique generally used for the purpose is watermarking. This has motivated the ongoing research in watermarking. In this paper, we develop an oblivious scheme for watermarking MPEG coded video stream over Internet. The inter-frame similarity present in a video sequence is exploited to calculate the watermark to be embedded. Watermark corresponding to a region in the current frame is obtained from its best match in the previous frame. The watermark is embedded during the coding process thereby keeping the overall computational overhead minimum. The algorithm has been tested in terms of the watermarked video quality and its capability in extracting the author´s signature (watermark bits). We have also tested the robustness of the proposed scheme against noise attack. Results obtained demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method.