Metadata hiding for UAV video based on digital watermarking in DWT transform

As the advent of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has been increased, the protection of the information within the transmitted or stored video has become a big challenge. Most known drone systems attach metadata of the recorded video in separate files or in the header of the video. Current techniques make the metadata unsecure and easy to get lost and removed as well as it occupies more storage and bandwidth. In this paper, an efficient method is proposed to hide the metadata of UAVs video using the technology of digital watermarking. Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is used to implement the embedding of the information robustly. The middle frequencies coefficients reside on CH3 sub-band are utilized to hide the watermark bits. In addition, a new scrambling algorithm is proposed to secure the information before hiding. The adaption of the proposed video watermarking algorithm to hide the metadata of the UAV video is achieved. The experimental results prove the high performance of the proposed method. The method had unnoticeable impact on the video quality where the PSNR of 44 dB is attained. The experiments show that the method achieves high robustness under various attacks and provides enough capacity for metadata hiding of UAV video.