HVS-based scalable video watermarking

Scalable coding methods are widely considered as promising coding approaches for image/video transmission in heterogeneous environments. To copyright protection of scalable coded videos, scalable video watermarking was introduced which enables reconstructing various scales of watermark from watermarked videos. This paper proposes a novel human vision system-based, spread spectrum method to scalable video watermarking. The host video is decomposed using newly proposed spatio-temporal motion-compensated 3D wavelet decomposition, called k($$\hbox {t}+2\hbox {D}$$t+2D) DWT decomposition, to frequency sub-bands. A scalable decomposition of the watermark is inserted into the entire frequency sub-bands of decomposed video. At each frequency sub-band, the watermark data are inserted into the selected coefficients of the sub-band frames in a way that the watermark embedding visual artifact occurs in the highly textured, highly contrasted, and very dark/bright areas of the video frames. The experimental results show that the watermarked test videos are highly transparent and robust against scalable video coding even at very low decoding bit-rates and some other video processing attacks. The proposed approach can guarantee copyright protection for scalable coded videos, especially over heterogeneous networks.