Spread transform watermarking for video sources

Spread transform (ST) is a quantization watermarking algorithm in which vectors of the wavelet coefficients of a host work are quantized, using one of two dithered quantizers, to embed hidden information bits; Loo (2002), had some success in applying such a scheme to still images. We extend ST to the video watermarking problem. Visibility considerations require that each spreading vector refer to corresponding pixels in each of several frames, that is, a multiframe embedding approach. Use of the hierarchical complex wavelet transform (CWT) for a visual mask reduces computation and improves robustness to jitter and valumetric scaling. We present a method of recovering temporal synchronization at the detector, and give initial results demonstrating the robustness and capacity of the scheme.