A practical design of digital video watermarking in H.264/AVC for content authentication

In this research, we propose a practical digital video watermarking scheme mainly used for authenticating the H.264/AVC compressed videos to ensure their correct content order. The watermark signals, which represent the serial numbers of video segments, are embedded into nonzero quantization indices of frames to achieve both the effectiveness of watermarking and the compact data size. The human visual characteristics are taken into account to guarantee the imperceptibility of watermark signals and to attain an efficient implementation in H.264/AVC. The issues of synchronized watermark detections are settled by selecting the shot-change frames for calculating the distortion-resilient hash, which helps to determine the watermark sequence. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed scheme as the embedded watermarks can survive the allowed transcoding processes while the edited segments in the tampered video can be located.

► A practical design of digital video watermarking for authenticating H.264/AVC compressed videos is proposed in this research.
► The procedures of watermarking are integrated with the H.264 coding routines to achieve the efficiency.
► The detection of the watermark can identify the ways of such manipulations as cropping and inserting shots.