Spatio-Temporal Context Based Adaptive Camcorder Recording Watermarking

• Published in: ACM transactions on multimedia computing communications and applications 2022-11, Vol.18 (3s), p.1-25, Article 144
• Main Authors: Hui, Chen, Liu, Shaohui, Shi, Wuzhen, Jiang, Feng, Zhao, Debin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Digital rights management; Privacy protections; Security and privacy; Social network security and privacy
• ISSN: 1551-6857; 1551-6865
• DOI: 10.1145/3503160

Video watermarking technology has attracted increasing attention in the past few years, and a great deal of traditional and deep learning-based methods have been proposed. However, these existing methods usually suffer from the following two challenges: First, most algorithms cannot resist camcorder recording attack, which limits their practical application. Second, watermark embedding may cause substantial degradation of video quality. Through analyzing the unique distortions presented in the camcorder recording process, including geometric distortion, temporal sampling distortion, sensor distortion and processing distortion, this paper proposes a novel spatio-temporal context based adaptive camcorder recording watermarking scheme STACR. In STACR, considering the geometric distortion and video visual quality, we embed the watermark by constructing a spatio-temporal histogram and incorporate a content features based adaptive locating algorithm to select embedding blocks and embedding strengths. As for the temporal sampling attack, we put forward a watermark correlation-based synchronization algorithm and combine it with cross-validation. Moreover, to resist the sensor distortion, we design a local matching-based algorithm to improve the extraction accuracy. In addition, grouped and repeated embedding strategies are combined to cope with the processing distortion. Experimental results compared with the state-of-the-art show that the proposed scheme achieves high video quality and is robust to geometric attacks, compression, scaling, transcoding, recoding, frame rate changes and especially for camcorder recording.