A flexible H.264/AVC compressed video watermarking scheme using particle swarm optimization based dither modulation

Due to the explosion of data sharing on the Internet and the ultimate use of digital media, especially digital video clips, there is great interest by digital video owners in video security and copyright protection. In this paper, a flexible particle swarm optimization (PSO) based dither modulation (DM) watermarking scheme in H.264/AVC compressed video is proposed. Its robustness, against the commonly employed watermarking attacks described in literature, is illustrated. The watermark imperceptibility and video quality also need to be taken into consideration, hence, a PSO is employed for optimizing the conflicting requirements. In addition to focusing on improving the robustness of the new watermarking scheme, the imperceptibility is enhanced by applying PSO, which keeps checking the objective function, including both factors. The proposed scheme allows users to add or drop diverse watermarking attacks for optimization and the effectiveness of this scheme is verified through a series of experiments.