A practical design of digital watermarking for video streaming services

•A practical watermarking scheme for video streaming services.•The signal embedding in the partially decoded video bit-stream to facilitate the operations of the streaming server.•The feature-based watermarking approach to facilitate blind watermark detection.•Robustness against geometrical transformations and video transcoding.•The signal detection method for carrying multiple bits in user-tracking applications.

A practical design of digital watermarking for video streaming services is proposed in this research. The information of a legitimate recipient is represented as a watermark, which is embedded in the video stream to serve as a cue to trace the recipient in case a clone of the video is illegally distributed. The watermark signals are designed to embed in some areas of video frames to benefit the video stream server, as the result of only partial actions required, including decoding, processing and re-encoding. The invariance of feature points and the self-similarity of hidden signals are further exploited to enable watermark detection without involving the original video. The watermark can decently survive transcoding processes and geometrical modifications of frames. The experimental results demonstrate the advantages of the proposed scheme in terms of watermark visibility, capacity and detection methodology.