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A Robust Watermarking Technique for High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) Based on Blind Extraction Scheme

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Abstract

In the field of multimedia, real-time video encoding systems and copyright protections, digital watermarking plays main role and shows promising means. In the same regard, digital watermarking is applied in compressed domain for video transmitting and storing to protect the contents of the main video signal. The need for video compressing and embedding has proven its importance due to its wide applications in daily life activities to protect these videos to be easily manipulated (e.g., trimmed, cropped, re-compressed). There have been several compression techniques for digital videos. One of the efficient standard compression video techniques is High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), a beneficiary to H.264 Advanced Video Coding (AVC), where it is considered as a latest standard for video compression with high compression rate. In this study, a robust digital watermarking technique with a blind extraction procedure for HEVC-encoded video is proposed. From practical point of view, a readable digital watermark is embedded imperceptibly in 4 \(\times\) 4 intra-predicted sub-blocks of the HEVC-tested video. The proposed watermarking structure imposes security by monitoring the spatio-temporal features in the target compressed video and generate a random key to select the appropriate embedding regions. The HEVC standard encoded video was exploiting to implement the embedding procedure. Practically, the experimental outcomes show that the proposed work restricts the increase in video bit rate and degradation of perceptual quality. In addition, the proposed scheme produces an average performance of the visual degradation up to 0.42 dB at the expense of 2.85% bit rate overhead and it shows good quality and robustness against additive Gaussian noise.

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  1. Computer System Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Zawia, Az-Zāwiyah, Libya

    Asem Khmag

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  1. Asem Khmag
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Khmag, A. A Robust Watermarking Technique for High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) Based on Blind Extraction Scheme. SN COMPUT. SCI. 2, 329 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42979-021-00729-y

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