A robust video watermarking technique for the tamper detection of surveillance systems

Abstract

A digital watermark embeds an imperceptible signal into data such as audio, video and images, for different purposes including authentication and tamper detection. A real-time video surveillance application requires a large quantity of sequences to be processed, which makes computational efficiency an additional constraint on video watermarking for surveillance systems. As a result, spatial domain schemes are a more efficient than frequency domain schemes. This paper focuses on video watermarking, particularly with respect to the Audio Video Interleaved (AVI) form of video file format. It proposes two new watermarking schemes which seem to offer a high degree of imperceptibility and efficient tamper detection. Both schemes were subjected to nine different types of common attack, which revealed one scheme, VW8F, to be superior, particularly in terms of imperceptibility. VW8F was then compared with a range of similar schemes by other authors. The results show that VW8F offers both improved imperceptibility (average PSNR of 47.87 dB) and proven efficiency at detecting a wider range of tampering compared to the other similar schemes.