A fragile watermarking scheme using prediction modes for H.264/AVC content authentication

Digital watermarking has been proposed as an effective scheme for copyright protection and content authentication. Fragile video watermarking is a type of video watermarking in which embedded watermark in the digital signal is destroyed when the signal is tempered or manipulated illegally. Authenticity of video streams can be proven by embedding fragile watermarks. We propose a fragile watermarking scheme for H.264/AVC video authentication. The scheme embeds fragile watermark in intra 4×4 (I4×4) prediction modes in the intra (I) frames only during encoding. The watermark is generated from features that are robust to recompression and is embedded into the prediction modes according to defined mapping rules. Experimental results show that our proposed scheme is sensitive to recompression and has a very low effect on the video quality and bitrate. Watermark can be embedded during encoding stage and authentication is verified during decoding process.