Robust video watermarking for wireless multimedia communications

Digital watermarking involves embedding copyright marks (watermarks), often imperceptibly, in multimedia objects to enhance or protect their value. In this paper we describe a novel watermarking algorithm suitable for video coding techniques such as MPEG-4 and H.263/H.324 and we test it in a wireless environment. The proposed algorithm satisfies critical properties not all of which are available in previous solutions. These properties include: resistance (robustness) of the embedded watermark to the error-prone nature of wireless channels as well as to video frame loss or misplacement, negligible probability of reading a non-embedded watermark, non-degradation of the marked video sequence and the possibility to mark video objects (e.g., MPEG-4 objects) in a single frame separately. Experimental results are given that show how these and other properties are achieved when video sequences are corrupted with errors that are typical of a wireless channel.