Video Watermarking Algorithm For H.264 In The Compressed Domain

In today's video delivery and broadcast networks, issues of copyright protection have become more urgent than in analog times. This is simply due to copying of digital video does not result in the decrease in quality that occurs when analog video is copied. One of the methods of copyright protection is to embed a digital code into the video sequence. The digital code is termed as watermark.Therefore, the objective of this project is to propose a digital video watermarking algorithm for H.264 in the compressed, domain whose complexity is low. The video coding standard decided to use was the H.264/MPEG4 AVC compression standard. The proposed algorithm exploits the specific characteristics of the compression standard H.264. The watermark to be embedded into the original video is randomly localized. It is on this foundation that our proposed video watermarking algorithm bases its secureness.In this proposed video watermarking algorithm for H.264 in the compressed domain, the watermark can be detected without the presence of the original video sequence. The watermark is blindly extracted by the help of the selected modified coefficient, Ai at the decoder. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can perform the real-time watermark embedding process without degrading visual quality of the digital video sequence and it is also standard-compliant. In the experimental results still during an attack by an attempt to remove the watermark, it was noticed that there were some degradations induced that created even some visible artifacts in the video. After a couple of experiments, it was generally noticed that the proposed video watermarking algorithm for H.264 in the compressed domain of this thesis was appropriate for real time applications.