Compressed domain video watermarking in motion vector

In this paper, a novel watermarking scheme in the compressed domain is proposed for video copyright protection. The robust watermark is embedded in motion vectors of the bitstream based on the relationships between one-pixel accuracy and half-pixel accuracy motion vectors at the encoder. Watermark can be blindly extracted by parsing the properties of motion vectors at the decoder. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can perform the real-time watermark embedding process without affecting visual quality of the video sequence and it is also standard-compliant. The proposed algorithm can be applied to any video compression standard with half-pixel accuracy motion vectors such as MPEG-2 and H.263.