A blind video watermarking algorithm for copyright protection based on Dual Tree Complex Wavelet Transform

DVDs and Blu-rays are among the most frequent victims of video content counterfeiting. Primarily, illegal distribution of movies on Internet is a growing menace to film industry. For this reason, authentication techniques are required to ensure the integrity and security of a video: the digital video watermarking can play a leading role in this field. In this paper, a blind digital video watermarking algorithm for copyright protection is proposed, in which the watermark is embedded into the third level of the Dual Tree Complex Wavelet Transform of both chrominance channels, to provide a robust watermarking algorithm. With the purpose of copyright protection, the information inserted in the video will be composed of two contributions: a digital watermark and a binary signature, generated from a desired name. This second contribution will ensure the copyright protection, in order to avoid the illicit distribution of the content. In addition, the inserted bits will be scattered along all the video’s frames, with the aim of preventing their interception and destruction, protecting the binary signature. The specific watermark of a frame is extracted from it without the key used for the watermark generation: this will provide robustness to temporal synchronization attacks, such as the frame rate conversion. This scheme is also robust to downscaling in resolution, noise addition, geometric attacks (such as upscaling and cropping), compression, watermark estimation, temporal frame averaging, multiple watermark embedding.