Developing an effective watermarking algorithm for video retrieval

With the proliferation of digital multimedia content, issues of copyright protection have become more important in video retrieval system because the copying of digital video does not result in the decrease in quality that occurs when analog video is copied. One method of copyright protection is to embed a digital code, ldquowatermarkrdquo, into the video sequence. The watermark can then unambiguously identify the copyright holder of the video sequence. In this paper we propose a new video watermark embedding algorithm that would insert watermarks into video sequences and also detect if a given video sequence contains a given watermark. The video standard that has been chosen is the H.264 standard as it offers a significant efficiency improvement over the previous video compression standards. A couple of tests that can be considered representative for most image manipulations and attacks were performed. The proposed algorithm has passed all attack tests. The watermarking mechanisms in this paper have been proved to be robust and efficient to protect the copyright of H.264 coded video within the video retrieval system.