DWT-based high-capacity blind video watermarking, invariant to geometrical attacks

The paper describes a high-capacity blind video watermarking system invariant to geometrical attacks such as shift, rotation, scaling and cropping. A spatial domain reference watermark is used to obtain invariance to geometric attacks by employing image registration techniques to determine and invert the attacks. A second, high-capacity watermark, which carries the data payload, is embedded in the wavelet domain according to a human visual system model. This is protected by a state-of-the-art error correction code (turbo code). For a false detection probability of 10^-8, the proposed system is invariant to scaling up to 180%, rotation up to 70°, and arbitrary aspect ratio changes up to 200% on both axes. Furthermore, the system is virtually invariant to any shifting, cropping, or combined shifting and cropping. The system is also robust to MPEG2 compression, even when combined with shifting and cropping.