Quantisation-based video watermarking in the wavelet domain with spatial and temporal redundancy

In this article we introduce a new public digital watermarking technique for video copyright protection working in the discrete wavelet transform domain. The scheme uses binary images as watermarks. These are embedded in the detail wavelet coefficients of the middle wavelet sub-bands. The method is a combination of spread spectrum and quantisation-based watermarking. Every bit of the watermark is spread over a number of wavelet coefficients with the use of a secret key. The resilience of the watermarking algorithm was tested against a series of eight different attacks using different videos. To improve the resilience of the algorithm we use error correction codes and embed the watermark with spatial and temporal redundancy. The proposed method achieves a very good perceptual quality with mean peak signal-to-noise ratio values of the watermarked videos of more than 40 dB and high resistance to a large spectrum of attacks.