Considering the reconstruction loop for watermarking of intra and inter frames OF H.264/AVC

This paper presents design and analysis of watermarking of intra and inter frames in H.264/AVC video codec. Most of video watermarking algorithms take into account only intra for watermark embedding. In this paper, we analyze watermark embedding in intra as well as in inter and we note that watermark embedding capability of inter is comparable to that of intra. Watermark embedding, in only those non-zero quantized transform coefficients (QTCs) which are above a specific threshold, enables us to detect and extract the watermark on the decoding side. There is not significant compromise on quality and bitrate of the video bitstream because we have taken into account the reconstruction loop during the watermarking step. The proposed scheme does not target robustness. Rather the main contribution of our scheme is higher payload as compared to payloads obtained in previous works.