Abstract: A drift compensation algorithm for robust H.264/AVC video watermarking in compressed domain was proposed. The drift compensation algorithm is adopted to reduce the visible decoding error, and the possible instances that reference blocks could be changed in the embedded process of watermarks are taken into consideration to avoid the further spread of distortion drift. The macroblocks with the least partition size are selected to embed watermarks and the algorithm utilizes the “energy compact” property of Discrete Cosine Transform to ensure stability under the attacks. The experiments show that this algorithm can obtain excellent imperceptibility. Drift compensation algorithm can significantly eliminate the visual influence caused by watermarking. Under the high lossy compression attack, an average detection correction rate of 80% can still be obtained with the proposed algorithm.

Key words:  H.264/AVC, video watermarking, drift compensation, motion vector, robust watermarking