Perceptually Adaptive Video Watermarking Using Motion Estimation

Video watermarks must maintain picture quality and withstand image processing, and resolving the tradeoff between these conflicting requirements has been one of the central problems in research on video watermarking. This paper shows that watermarks are less perceptible where picture contents are moving and proposes a new criterion for measuring watermark imperceptibility from motion vectors and deformation quantities. It also proposes a watermarking method that uses this criterion to allocate watermarks to picture areas adaptively. Experimental evaluation showed that the proposed method reduces degradation in picture quality and that, for the same picture quality after MPEG encoding and decoding, between 30% and 40% more watermarks can be embedded, improving detection reliability after MPEG processing by an average of 9.5%. The proposed method would be most effective when used with MPEG encoders because they already have the necessary motion estimation functions.