Efficient Watermarking for High Efficiency Video Coding

Abstract

According to the report of the Cisco, around 73% of the global traffic of data is in the form of High Definition (HD) and Ultra High Definition (UHD) quality videos. HEVC provides good visual output with 50% more compression accuracy contrasted with that of the previous H.264 / AVC encoding format. Consequently, nowadays, HEVC is hugely used for transmission of HD and UHD videos over the Internet. Therefore, video security concerns such as content protection and authentication of HEVC encoded videos have emerged an important area of research. Over the last few decades, digital watermarking has been used to deter copying, preserve integrity of content, track video transmission and dissemination. The present work is based on developing efficient watermarking schemes for authentication and protection of HEVC encoded videos by addressing the drawbacks of existing literature. The main features of the authentication scheme are that it should detect the malicious tampering in the contents of the video and must resist the non-malicious contents preserving manipulations that are done for transcoding the encoded videos. The main drawback of the existing authentication schemes is that they cannot resist the transcoding processing, i.e. re-compression with different Quantization Parameter (QP). To overcome this problem, in the present thesis, an authentication scheme is designed for HEVC, which can help shield the sanctity of the video during transcoding. In new scheme, invariant features, i.e. the relationship between the signs of negative and positive coefficients in blocks, is used to generate the authentication code. These features do not change after re-compression of the video with the same or different QP values. On the other hand, the generated authentication code is fragile to any malicious alterations such as insertion and deletion of objects in the contents of the video. The generated code is inserted into the video by altering the magnitudes of negative and positive coefficients.