H.264 copyright protection with motion vector watermarking

Recently, digital watermarking has been one of the most appealing domains in copyright protection because of its residence in the content and negligible visual effects. In this paper, a video watermarking scheme is proposed which embeds copyright information in H.264 bitstream motion vectors. In the proposed method, a watermark string is embedded into the motion vector components with the larger size considering the video movement direction which will be retrieved in decoder. The main contribution is to adjust an adaptive threshold in such a way that with a defined number of embedded bits, i.e. the watermark payload, the video quality degradation will be negligible.