3D DFT-based video watermarking using perceptual models

In this paper, we propose a multi-bit watermarking technique for video sequences. An N-bit message is embedded in one unit of video fragment, in which a scene is employed as a watermarking unit. The proposed algorithm is fundamentally based on the three-dimensional discrete Fourier transform (DFT). In order to generate a watermark with optimum weighting factors, the perceptual properties for all the three-dimensional DFT coefficients should be computed, but this strategy seems to be undesirable due to the high computational complexity. So, we design a perceptual model of an image in the DFT domain, and apply it to the video watermarking. The proposed perceptual model is expected to give high fidelity and effective, compared to fully calculated visual masks, since it derives all the masks from one reference mask with a well-known estimation method. Through the computer simulations, it can be shown that the proposed watermarking algorithm with the perceptual model yields effective performance for fidelity. Moreover, it was also shown that the proposed scheme provides robustness against various attacks, such as compression, geometric attacks, and collusion attacks.