Watermarking video content using visual cryptography and scene averaged image

With the increasing convergence of network, services, and devices, more number of end user devices are accessing digital media content which were hitherto accessible mainly from computers and television sets. This makes the digital media more prone to illegal copying and distribution. In this paper, we propose a robust digital video watermarking scheme for copyright protection using the principles of visual cryptography, scene change detection in videos, and conversion of each scene into an image by averaging the frames in the scene. In the proposed method, data is extracted and stored as one share of the watermark pattern instead of embedding data into the original video as in the conventional watermarking schemes. Since no data is embedded, the method is robust against watermark attacks aimed at detecting and destroying or distorting data embedded into videos. Simulation results show that the method is robust even in the case of 50% frame drop. All the watermarked scenes, not frames, need to be dropped for an effective attack against the watermark. Dropping of scenes makes the video less attractive for illegal copying and distribution.