A robust frame-based technique for video watermarking

During the last few years multimedia systems success has been definitely spurred by the development of network-based on line services, like electronic commerce, teleducation, teletraining, media distribution and so on, in which multimedia systems have a major role. In this new scenario the request for privacy, security and authenticity of the documents, undergone to these transactions, is strongly upcoming. Watermarking techniques, deriving from information hiding theory, have been suggested so far as an effective and suitable solution to satisfy this kind of requirements, and in a short time many and disparate algorithms applying different strategies to achieve the same goal have been proposed in scientific literature and by commercial entities. In this paper a watermarking algorithm, originally conceived for still images applications, has been extended to raw video, treating it as a set of single still frames. A good robustness against usual image processing and geometric manipulations has been achieved, moreover experiments with MPEG2 coding/decoding at different bit rates have been carried out giving positive results.