Digital video watermarking technique

A watermark inserted in a video signal can be used for DVD copy protection.
First of all, the watermark should satisfy the requirements of strength and
imperceptibility. Besides this, it can be bestowed on to convey the information to restrict
copying in many ways such as copy never i.e. the DVD is copy protected, copy no more
i.e. it is possible to copy a finite number of times, copy liberally i.e. it can be copied any
number of times, copy only once. The design depends upon the content in the DVD.A
general process of digital video watermarking consists of inserting a group of bits along
with the video frame to be transmitted. The process of insertion of watermark is through a
‘hidden key’ that is known to the transmitting person and the receiving person as well.

Actual video signal refers to a single image of a video sequence. Now that, the
watermark is inserted into an image of a video sequence, it is susceptible to wide range of
attacks in the channel through which it is transmitted. These attack could include
deliberate attacks and attacks by chance, i.e. not deliberately done. Some of the deliberate
attacks are reducing frames, conspiracy and geometric attacks. Herein, the signal is not
completely damaged or distorted beyond use, for the pirate who attacks thus would like
to use it anyway. Other range of attacks that the signal could suffer is those that arise
from the errors due to transmission and also due to errors generated during processing of
the signal. Now, the process of extraction or removal of watermark is an intricate process.
This process consists of extraction of watermark from the received watermarked signal,
provided the ‘hidden key’ is known By the time the signal arrives at the watermarking
process, it might in a compressed form i.e. it might have undergone compression
techniques. Compression is a technique that reduces the storage space required for a
digital form of the video signal. This is essential to meet the bandwidth requirements. So
it is necessary that the watermark signal be inserted directly into this signal, which in
compressed form without having to decode the video signal to reduce intricacy

This is accomplished by changing the span of the codes and subsequently

inserting the watermark. This eases the insertion process. The drawback to this process is
that the watermark is vulnerable to remove entirely at the time of detection. To make the
watermark stable even after detection, the watermark is inserted by imposing energy
differences between different parts of a video signal.