Transform permuted watermarking for copyright protection of digital video

As we move into an age of widespread availability and distribution of digital video content, the content production industry has justifiable concerns about copyright violations; digital copies are simple, cheap and exact. Embedded invisible digital watermarks have been discussed and proposed in the past as a means of providing proof of ownership in cases where digital video copyright violations are claimed. However, previous solutions have suffered from a lack of true security and unmanageable limitations such as the requirement to have an authenticated original present when reading a watermark. In this paper, a new watermarking solution is described, based on a unique data randomisation approach, which provides excellent security while simultaneously achieving invisibility of the watermark and robustness to picture manipulation and distortion. The solution is easily implemented, tolerant of video compression and even digital-to-analogue and analogue-to-digital conversion, yet does not require availability of the original content to read the watermark