H.264 video watermarking with secret image sharing

More people are studying digital video stream transference via networks. However, frequent Internet use increases the requirement for copyright protection and security. As a consequence, to prevent video streams that belong to rightful owners from being intentionally or unknowingly used by others, information protection is indispensable. The authors propose a novel method for video watermarking that is specifically designed for H.264 video. For the experiment, a low-energy signal can relatively guard against low-pass filter attacks. Conversely, a high-energy signal in the host signal can relatively guard against the high-frequency noise attack. In view of these facts, the proposed system design embedding algorithm provides high-energy and low-energy blocks. The blocks in the host image frame are divided into two different groups by estimating the block energy. The existing singular value decomposition methods were employed to calculate the watermark information. In order to enhance the security, the proposed system also employs torus automorphisms to encrypt the watermark. To achieve better robustness, the encrypted results use secret image sharing technology embedded into different I-frames in the video stream.