Watermarking of Compressed Video in the Bitstream Domain: An Efficient Algorithm and its Implementation

Digital watermarking of multimedia data is a very active research area that has enjoyed a considerable amount of attention in recent years. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for embedding/detecting a fragile watermark in MPEG-4 compressed video domain (Simple and Advance Simple Profiles). The watermark bits are put directly into Huffman VLC-codespace of quantized DCT domain. The advantage of watermark embedding into the compressed domain is the significant savings for a real-time implementation as it does not require a full decoding operation. The watermark embedding does not change the video file size. The algorithm demonstrates high watermarking capacity, thereby providing reliable foolproof authentication. The results of experimental testing demonstrate that watermark embedding preserves the video quality. Watermark detection is performed without using the original video.