Improved watermark payload capacity using DE on IPCM macroblocks in H.264/AVC

This paper proposes a reversible watermarking technique that utilizes the IPCM macroblocks generated by the H.264/AVC encoder. The technique applies the concept of Differential Expansion (DE) to the pixels of the luminance and the chrominance components within the IPCM macroblocks of the P-frames. The performance of the proposed algorithm was tested for a number of video sequences and compared to similar techniques. The results show that the watermark thus embedded is of a high capacity while at the same time ensured minimal bitrate increase and negligible degradation of PSNR values.