Real-time watermarking algorithm of H.264 / AVC video stream

Due to the extensive use of digital media applications, digital productions are easily copied and manipulated. Therefore, multimedia security and copyright protection is becoming important. Digital watermarking is an excellent tool to ensure security and protection of multimedia data by embedding some information into the digital production. For real time applications, such as Internet Protocol-Television (IP-TV) and digital TV broadcasting, a low complexity algorithm should be adopted, when video residing in a server has to be broadcasted by different stations and under different broadcasting rights. In this paper, a low complexity video watermarking scheme for H.264 has been presented. Our contribution is to attain lower complexity in embedding procedure and extracting watermark. At the same time, we avoid a Bit-Rate Increase (BIR) and improve the runtime-efficiency and embedding capacity without sacrificing quality. The watermark is embedded into a video sequence by modifying the number of nonzero-quantized Alternating Current (AC) coefficients in a 4×4 block of I frames. The experimental results show that the proposed method can prevent a BIR and improve the runtime-efficiency and embedding capacity without sacrificing the perceptual quality.