Biological Viral Infection Watermarking Architecture of MPEG/H.264/AVC/HEVC

This paper addresses the viral infectious watermarking (VIW) model using biological virus infection for a new-paradigm of video copyright protection of MPEG/H.264/AVC/HEVC. Our model aims to spread or infect the watermark to different codecs each time video contents are copied, edited, or transcoded. Thus, we regard the watermark as the infectious virus, the video content as the host, and the video codec as the contagion medium and then model pathogen, mutant, and contagion as the infectious watermark. Then, we define the techniques of viral infectious watermark generation, kernel-based VIW, and content-based VIW. Furthermore, we present a reversible VIW for fast infection in VIW model. This makes the video quality and strength be adaptively controlled in the infectious process. Experiment results verified that our VIW model can detect or recover the reversible watermark without loss in different codecs and also can maintain the quality of video content that is recovered to the same bit rate.