Watermarking of Digital Video Stream for Source Authentication

In this paper, a novel idea of embedding a watermark pattern in BT.656 raw digital video stream is proposed and implemented in Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) hardware for real time authentication. Earlier many watermarking algorithms are proposed for video authentication both in compressed as well as in uncompressed domain. A watermark is introduced in the stream either at source, channel or at the receiver. Most of methods targets embedding the watermark in the compressed domain before being transmitted over the channel or at the play back, very few techniques concentrates on the raw video data at the source. In this proposed work, we embed the watermark pattern at the very beginning stage of digital video production i.e., at BT.656 video interface. A 64-bit length device DNA or user defined payload is embedded as an invisible watermark. Optionally visible logo is used as a visible watermark. Embedding of watermark bits is done in Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) domain for its robustness against various attacks. Only the luminance component of the BT.656 video stream is watermarked. An experimental result shows that the proposed method is operating in real time while maintaining the good perceptual visual quality measured in terms of PSNR.