Object based video watermarking scheme using inertia ellipse and shape adaptive DCT

Video object (VO) is an important concept in MPEG-4. For objects can be easily manipulated without visible distortion, the copyright protection of video objects becomes an important issue. This paper presents a watermarking scheme for video objects. Different from other methods, the proposed scheme employed inertia ellipse to achieve fast synchronization recovery in case the object was manipulated. Shape adaptive DCT and visual mask were combined to embed the watermark into the arbitrarily shaped object, which was designed to achieve the trade-off between the invisibility and the robustness. Experiments show that our algorithm is robust to object manipulations such as rotations, translations, scaling and lossy compression. Our scheme can be easily incorporated into the object-based coding framework of MPEG-4.