Robust transcoding-resilient H.264 watermarking

The H.264 standard is widely deployed for high-quality consumer video recording, storage and sharing applications such as Blu-ray DVD and streaming HD video on the internet including YouTube. In current times, since videos are easily shared live on social media and messaging mobile apps, users need the ability to determine the ownership of these videos against being illegally distributed without proper acknowledgements to the owners, and to take actions against those who spread false videos that trigger viral fake news. Robust watermarking schemes are popularly applied techniques to solve these problems. These types of schemes are required to achieve robustness against modification attacks on the embedded watermark. In this paper, we present the design of a new robust watermarking scheme for these purposes, namely that achieves robustness against common modification attacks aiming to change the watermarks embedded by the owner, and it is furthermore resilient to transcoding. The latter property ensures that the embedded watermark remains detectable despite having undergone the common video processing operation of transcoding.