Spatial digital watermark for MPEG-2 video authentication and tamper detection

The widespread adoption of digital video techniques has generated a requirement for authenticity verification in applications such as criminal evidence, insurance claims and commercial databases. This work addresses problems that arise from a spatial digital watermarking technique developed to detect frame reordering and dropping scenarios. It discusses the differences between mutual frame types at different bit-rates. Many papers consider detection after MPEG-2 decoding as a naïve approach. However, this approach does offer significant advantages for a slight increase of computation load. This paper also establishes a link between the detector performance and the sequence content. The uniqueness of this work is the comparison of the test results using 18 different standard MPEG test-sequences. The functionality of the algorithm is demonstrated with a simulated attack.