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Robust drift-free bit-rate preserving H.264 watermarking

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Abstract

This paper presents a novel method for open-loop watermarking of H.264/AVC bitstreams. Existing watermarking algorithms designed for previous encoders, such as MPEG-2 cannot be directly applied to H.264/AVC, as H.264/AVC implements numerous new features that were not considered in previous coders. In contrast to previous watermarking techniques for H.264/AVC bitstreams, which embed the information after the reconstruction loop and perform drift compensation, we propose a completely new intra-drift-free watermarking algorithm. The major design goals of this novel H.264/AVC watermarking algorithm are runtime-efficiency, high perceptual quality, (almost) no bit-rate increase and robustness to re-compression. The watermark is extremely runtime-efficiently embedded in the compressed domain after the reconstruction loop, i.e., all prediction results are reused. Nevertheless, intra-drift is avoided, as the watermark is embedded in such a way that the pixels used for the prediction are kept unchanged. Thus, there is no drift as the pixels being used in the intra-prediction process of H.264/AVC are not modified. For watermark detection, we use a two-stage cross-correlation. Our simulation results confirm that the proposed technique is robust against re-encoding and shows a negligible impact on both the bit-rate and the visual quality.

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Notes

  1. A demo is available for download at the following url: http://www.irccyn.ec-nantes.fr/~autrusse/DEMO/.

  2. http://iphome.hhi.de/suehring/tml/.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IRCCyN UMR CNRS 6597, Polytech Nantes, LUNAM Université, Université de Nantes, Rue Christian Pauc, BP 50609, 44306, Nantes, France

    Wei Chen, Zafar Shahid, Thomas Stütz, Florent Autrusseau & Patrick Le Callet

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  1. Wei Chen
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  2. Zafar Shahid
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  3. Thomas Stütz
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  4. Florent Autrusseau
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  5. Patrick Le Callet
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Correspondence to Florent Autrusseau.

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Chen, W., Shahid, Z., Stütz, T. et al. Robust drift-free bit-rate preserving H.264 watermarking. Multimedia Systems 20, 179–193 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00530-013-0329-x

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