MPEG-4 AVC stream watermarking by ST-mDM techniques

The present paper introduces a new insertion/detection technique for MPEG-4 AVC stream protection by means of watermarking techniques. The embedding process relies on the ST-DM (Spread Transform - Dither Modulation) principles and adapts/extends the Watson´s perceptual model so as to cope with the compressed domain peculiarities. In contrast to the state-of-the art techniques considering only binary insertion techniques, our paper demonstrates the first m-ary DM technique; in such a way, for a prescribed transparency and robustness, the data payload is increased by a factor of log₂m. The experimental results correspond to the MEDIEVALS (French National Project) corpus of 4 video sequences of about 15 minutes each. The robustness against noise addition, transcoding and geometric (StirMark) attacks is proved. The transparency is assessed by both subjective and objective measures.