A Blind and Robust Watermarking Scheme for H.

264 Video
lB. Y. Lei*, lK. T. Lo, Senior Member, IEEE, and Haijun Lei IDept. of Electronic and Information Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong 2College of Computer Science and Technology, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China
07900858r@polyu.edu.hk
Abstract- H.264/AVC is becoming a popular video codec for
its better compression ratio, lower distortion and applicability to portable electronic appropriate devices. for Thus, issues of copyright very protection this standard become

important. In this paper, a new blind SVD (Singular Value Decomposition) - DCT combined video watermarking scheme for the ".264 standard is proposed. The proposed method is a blind watermarking algorithm as the hidden information can be extracted without the original video and the original singular values. To reduce visual quality degradation caused by coefficients modifying, the perceptual model and block selection mechanism are introduced to control the modification strength. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated with respect to imperceptibility, robustness and data payload. Experimental results reveal that the proposed scheme achieves enough robustness while preserving the perceptual quality.

I. INTRODUCTION ne effective solution gaining popularity in protecting contents for copyright owners is digital watermarking which embeds the copyright information into the digital media. H.264/AVC is the latest coding and compression standard with advanced compression technique, improved perceptual quality, network friendliness and versatility [1]. As H.264/AVC becomes more prevalent, the industry will need copyright protection methods. However, the large body of MPEG series video watermarking algorithms cannot be applied directly to H.264/AVC because H.2641AVC uses different transformation and block sizes; therefore, development of new and appropriate watermarking algorithms for H.264/AVC is required. In general, H.2641AVC coding standard adopts many new features and can be exploited for watermarking purpose. Actually, compressed domain watermarking methods arouse great interests of industries and researches to the intellectual property protection. A few recently published papers have discussed embedding a watermark in the H.2641AVC bitstream sequence. For example, in [2], Hartung et al. embedded the watermark into the H.2641AVC bitstream directly. But this method is too complex. The H.264 watermarking method proposed in [3] inserted watermarks into selected 4x4 OCT blocks in intra-frames. However, this embedding method needs to send side information for watermark extraction. In [4], Zhang et al. developed a robust video watermarking algorithm of H.2641AVC with two different watermarks. A binary sequence and grayscale image after proposed pre-processing served as watermark were

O digital

inserted into the integer 4x4 DCT coefficient with spread spectrum method which are compatible with H.2641AVC standard and resisted most of the signal processing and other attacks. Besides, Lagrangian optimization was used to select optimal mode and a slide-window are adopted to further improve the performance. In [5], the authors present a blind watermarking algorithm that embeds the watermark in H.264/AVC I-frames. However, it requires decompressing the video in order to embed the watermark. A human visual model has been used in [6] to design watermarking algorithms for MPEG-2 video which increased the payload and robustness with limited visual distortion. Recently, SVD is a desirable and powerful transform techniques explored for robust watermarking. If SVD is applied to the cover signal directly, the imperceptibility was not guaranteed because small changes in singular values may result in large artifacts after reverse transformation. Since OCT based technique is one of the most popular transform domain techniques and adopted in H.264/AVC. Therefore, our proposed scheme combines SVD with DCT to further tradeoff between robustness and imperceptibility. The two transform domain techniques provide different, but complementary levels of robustness against the same attack. In fact, there are some image and video watermarking techniques based on SVD-DCT in the literature too. Kong et al. [7] proposed a SVD based blind video watermarking method, but it only showed the desirable robustness property against MPEG-2 compression instead of the latest H.2641AVC attack. In [8], Wang et al. designed a blind robust watermarking scheme based on SVD-DCT, but it only built on H.263 rather than H.264/AVC. One SVD-DCT based watermarking for MPEG-2 video is proposed in [9].In summary, blind watermarking based on SVD-DCT has not been investigated to be compatible to H.2641AVC standard. The further study and investigation are required. The goal of this paper is to present a robust SVD-DCT watermarking algorithm for H.264/AVC that is both fast and robust enough for practical applications. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. SVD watermarking principle is introduced in Section II. Watermark embedding and extraction are given in Section III and IV respectively. Section V presents the experimental results. Finally, Section VI concludes the paper. II. SVD WATERMARKING

978-1-4244-8223-811 0/$26.00 2010 IEEE

421

SVD is a numerical technique for linear algebraic in the transformed domain consists of basis states that is optimal in some sense. Although SVD works for any NxM matrix A, our discussion will be limited for the NxN matrix. The SVD of the NxN matrix A is defined as: A= UDVT (I) where U and VE RNxN are unitary, and DE RNxN is a diagonal matrix and the superscript T denotes matrix transposition. The diagonal elements of D are called the singular values of A and reassumed to be arranged in decreasing order. The columns of the U matrix are called the left singular vectors while the columns of the V matrix are called the right singular vectors of A. In SVD-based watermarking, a frame is treated as a matrix decomposed into three matrices. The watermark carrier w(i,j) is added with a scaling or strength factor as follows: Wd(i,j)= OJ +abOjw(i,j) (2)

Step 3: Permute the binary watermark sequence by a random seed key; Step 4: Perform SVD on each block to produce singular values; Step 5: Divide every frame of the video into a number of non-overlapping blocks, each including 4x4 pixels; Step 6: Concatenate the first singular values from adjacent 16 blocks to form a 4x4 SV block; Step 7: For each SV block, DCT is performed to obtain its corresponding SVD-DCT block. The difference between the magnitudes of two coefficients in a selected pair is first computed as follows: D(xl'Yl'X2'Y2,Zl'Z2)= 1 F(xl'Yl'zj) I-I F(X2'Y2,Z2) I (5) where F(xl'Yl'zj) and F(X2'Y2,Z2) are the coordinates of the selected pair in the SVD-DCT block. The case of embedding a watermark bit "I" is as follows: I) If D:2': mask, no operations are needed; 2) If D
<

where OJ are the singular values of the matrix A(diagonal elements of D), bE (0,1) is the polarity of the watermark sequence to be embedded. w(i,j) represents the random carrier elements, and a is a strength factor. Before embedding, the watermark is also shaped by the original singular value coefficients. We adaptively scale the watermark strength with perceptual concerns. The resulting watermark matrix is subjected to a new SVD operation denoted as: WD= Uw DwV (3) Finally, the watermarked message block Aw is obtained by inverse SVD operation. Aw = UDWVT III.
WATERMARK EMBEDDING

mask , perform the following operations:

F'(xl'Yl'Zj)= sign(F(xl'yl'Zj [(F(xl'yj,Zj) +F(X2'Y2,Zz})/2 +0.5mask] F'(X2'Y2,Z2)= sign(F(x2'Y2'Z2. [(F(xl'Yl'Zj) +F(X2'Y2'Z2

I 2 - 0.5mask ]

(6) where mask is the frequency mask for changing the watermarking strength according to the Human Visual System (HVS). For embedding a bit of "0", the embedding mechanism is the same as embedding "1" with the swap of the positions of F(xl'Yl'zj) and F(X2'Y2,Z2). IV.
WATERMARK EXTRACTION

(4)

In order to achieve high robustness against common processing operations and H.264 compression attacks, a SVD-DCT hybrid domain watermarking scheme is proposed in this paper as shown in Fig.l.
Watermark sequence

Fig.I.The proposed H.264 watermarking scheme The embedding procedure is described in details in the following steps: Step I: Divide the video clip into video scenes; Step 2: Convert every video frame from ROB to YCBCR color matrix format;

The proposed algorithm is also blind in the sense that it does not need the original video in the extraction process. Therefore, we can extract the watermark image from the watermarked video frames directly as presented in detail in the following steps: Step I: Divide the watermarked video clip into watermarked scenes; Step 2: Process the watermarked frames of each watermarked video scene using SVD; Step 3: Convert the video frame from ROB color matrix to YCBCR; Step 4: Retrieval the positions of the coefficients pairs in each SVD-DCT block; Step 5: The difference between coefficients of each selected pair is computed as: D w(xj,x2,Yj'Y2,Zj,zz}= 1 Fw(xj,yj,Zj) - Fw(X2'Y2'Z2) I (7) where Fw(xl'Yl'Zj) and Fw(x2,Y2,Z2) are the selected pairs of coefficients that might be watermarked; Step 6: Sum the values of different corresponding to all pairs of coefficients where the same bit is repeatedly embedded: (8)

422

Step 7: The extracted bit is judged as follows: W=

{I

S;?:

S<O

(9)

Step 8: Apply inverse SVD on the modified coefficient matrix and extract the embedded watermark. V.
EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS

It can be derived that robustness of watermarks depends on the DCT domain watermarking technique. The smaller block-size of 4 x 4 integer DCT transform reduces the ringing artifacts to further improve the robustness.
B.

Imperceptibility

The proposed watermarking scheme has been integrated with the H.264/AVC JM 12.1 reference software for simulation. The frame rate was 30 frames per second. The H.264 software was run on a number of sample videos such as Mobile, Foreman, Carphone, Container and Suzie in QCIF format (176x144). In our experiments, the watermark is a pseudo-random sequence. The first 25 frames of the video sequences are used in the experiments. We evaluated the performance of the proposed SVD-DCT video watermarking algorithm with respect to imperceptibility and robustness. A. Robustness In video watermarking application, robustness is usually measured against compression, rotation, Gaussian noise, salt & pepper noise, frame dropping, frame averaging, and frame swapping and other attacks. The similarity between the original and extracted watermarks is evaluated using the correlation factor which may take values between 0 and 1. The high correlation value clearly indicates robustness of the algorithm against major attacks. As shown in table I, the watermark can still be extracted with a high correlation value after various attacks. It also maintained a high degree of robustness.
TABLE I WATERMARK ROBUSTNESS AGAINST VARIOUS ATTACKS sequences
H.264/AVC 0.9226 6M bit/s H.264/AVC 4M bit/s Shift Median filter Rotation and scale Frame dropping Frame averaging Adding Gaussian noise Adding Sa1t& Pepper noise 0.8912 0.9078 0.9190

The PSNR (Peak Signal Noise Ratio) is typically adopted to judge the visual quality of the embedding watermark frames. The average PSNR for all watermarked frames was 41.18 which mean not much quality degradation in the watermarked video was perceived. This high PSNR value proves imperceptibility of the proposed SVD-DCT algorithm. Fig.2 presents the results of foreman sequence with watermark and without watermark respectively. From Fig. 2, it is observed that the watermarks in our scheme cause no visible artifacts to the video picture. In the experiments, no obvious and visible degradation can be observed in the entire test video sequences. The results indicate that our scheme always maintains a higher perceptual quality score. It can be concluded that transparency of this algorithm is rather good.

Mobile

Forman

Container

Suzie

(a) (b) Fig.2. The first frame of foreman with and without watermark; (a) unwatermarked;(b)watermarked Besides, we compare performance of our SVD-DCT scheme with the pure SVD scheme in [7], as comparison results of pure SVD method in not fair enough, we also compare our method with the similar SCD-DCT method in [8], which is also blind method based on SVD-DCT transform, however, this method is not built on H.264 frame. A higher value indicates that the watermarked video is perceptually closer to the original sequence. Fig.3 shows the PSNR comparison results of the first 25 frame of Mobile sequence in our method, SVD method in [7] and SVD-DCT method in [8]. It can be obviously noted that our scheme outperform the SVD method in [7] and SVD-DCT method in [8] as our proposed method have a relative high average PSNR. The reason for your higher PSNR is that we adopt some enhanced feature to improve the performance and downgrade the negative effects.

0.9128

0.8894

0.8945

0.9030

0.8324 0.9323

0.8065 0.8842

0.8146 0.8832

0.8235 0.8975

0.8231

0.8013

0.8023

0.8156

0.8474

0.7941

0.8017

0.8197

0.8356

0.7825

0.7989

0.8054

0.9026

0.8464

0.8532

0.8693

0.9134

0.8538

0.8674

0.8757

423

F'Si'R restJts d first 25111B:aa1<a:l1ia're> d "m:die'

rotation and cropping by multiwatermark technique.

REFERENCES [1] "Draft lTU-T recommendation and final draft international standard of joint video specification (lTU-T Rec. H.264 I [SOIlEC 14496-10 AVC). Joint Video Team (JVT) of [SOIlEC MPEG and lTU-T VCEG JVT-G050," 2003. F. Hartung and B. Girod, "Watermarking of uncompressed and compressed video," Signal Processing, vol. 66,pp. 283-301, 1998. N. Maneli and M. M. Russell, "A Framework for Robust Watermarking of H.264-Encoded Video With Controllable Detection Performance," IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, voL 2, pp. 14-23,2007. 1. Zhang, A T. S. Ho, G. Qiu, and P. Marziliano, "Robust video watermarking of H.264/AVC," IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II: Analog and Digital Signal Processing, vol. 54,pp. 205-209, 2007. W. Guo-Zua, W. Yi-Jung, and H. Wen-Hsing, "Robust watermark embedding/detection algorithm for H.264 video," Journal of Electronic Imaging, vol. 14,pp. 13013-1,2005. D. Simitopoulos,S. A. Tsaftaris,N. V. Boulgouris,and M. G. Strintzis, "Compressed-domain video watermarking of MPEG streams," in Proc. of IEEE International Con! on Multimedia and Expo, pp.569-72,2002. W. H. Kong, BAYang, D. Wu, and X. M. Niu, "SVD based blind video watermarking algorithm," in Proc. of First International Cor(. on Innovative Computing, Iriformation and Control, pp. 265-268,2006. H. X. Wang, Z. M. Lu, and S. H. Sun "A blind video watermarking algorithm based on SVD in the DCT domain," in Proc. of International Electronic Con! on Computer Science, pp. 360-364, 2007. W. Di, K. Wenhai, Y. Bian, and N. Xiamu, "A fast SVD based video watermarking algorithm compatible with MPEG2 standard," Soft Computing, vol. 13,pp. 375-82,2009.

[2] [3]

Fig.3. Comparison of PSNR of the first 25 watermarked frames with pure SVD method in [7] and SVD-DCT method in [8]
C.

[4]

[5]

Payload
[6]

Data payload or watermarking capacity for a given host video clip is defined as the number of watermark pixels that can be embedded in the host video without causing any visual distortion in the video. To compare the proposed algorithm in terms of payload, suppose that we have a scene with 56 frames and an SVD matrix (U, S, V) with a dimension 240 x 240. As we adopt the block based SVD-DCT method for watermark embedding and detection, the payload of our algorithm is found by multiplying number of frames by number of blocks per frame by number of pixel per frame. Therefore, the payload of our proposed method is 252000 pixels, which shows our proposed block-based algorithm's payload is higher enough for some feasible application when some large watermarks are needed in video watermarking. D. Complexity For the complexity performance, from the above description, as we adopts some enhance feature and algorithm to enhance the robustness and build on algorithm on the high complexity video codec, H.264, therefore, the complexity of our proposed method is more higher than the SVD method in [7] and SVD-DCT method in [8]. As we know, the higher complexity means higher time requirement, as a result, the real-time performance of H.264 will be downgraded. However, in our experiments, even though the realtime is sacrificed a little bit, H.264 can still achieve realtime performance, which indicats the complexity is in the acceptable level. VI. CONCLUSION A novel and hybrid digital video watermarking algorithm of H.264 with combination of two powerful mathematical transforms DCT and SVD to exploit their attractive features is proposed and implemented in this paper. Experimental results demonstrated the advantages of our proposed method are blindness, robustness against compression and simple geometrical attack. Our algorithm is robust to most attacks like H.264/AVC compression, rescaling, shifting, filtering, etc. In our future work, we will improve the algorithm to gain better performance against other attacks like big

[7]

[8]

[9]

424