A Video Watermarking Technique Based on Pseudo-3-D DCT and Quantization Index Modulation

The increasing popularity of the internet means that digital multimedia are transmitted more rapidly and easily. And people are very aware for media ownership. However, digital watermarking is an efficient and promising means to protect intellectual properties. Based on the intellectual property attention in the information era, how to protect the personal ownership is extremely important and a necessary scheme. In this paper, we propose an effective video watermarking method based on a pseudo-3-D discrete cosine transform (DCT) and quantization index modulation (QIM) against several attacks. The watermark is mainly inserted into the uncompressed domain by adjusting the correlation between DCT coefficients of the selected blocks, and the watermark extraction is blind. This approach consists of a pseudo-3-D DCT, watermark embedding, and extraction. A pseudo-3-D DCT, which is taken DCT transformation twice, will be first utilized to calculate the embedding factor and to obtain the useful messages. Using the QIM, we embed the watermark into the quantization regions from the successive raw frames in the uncompressed domain and record the relative information to create a secret embedding key. This secret embedding key will further apply to extraction. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can survive filtering, compressions, luminance change, and noise attacks with a good invisibility and robustness.