A Novel Video Watermarking Approach Based on Implicit Distortions

Copyright-sensitive videos are commonly leaked or illegally distributed by so-called digital pirates. Video owners aim to prevent this by hiding a unique watermark in every video that contains information about the receiver. If the video is then illegally distributed, the copyright owner can extract the watermark and identify the malicious consumer. However, pirates may manipulate the video in the hope of destroying the embedded watermark. Although a variety of imperceptible and robust solutions exist, these introduce many artificial distortions to the video. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel video watermarking approach in which only a single encoder decision is explicitly changed. Then, the explicit change automatically propagates into a large collection of implicit distortions that represents the watermark. The implicit distortions resemble ordinary, encoder-created compression artifacts and hence are imperceptible. Additionally, they prove to be robust against video manipulations. Furthermore, the proposed scheme requires no modification of existing consumer electronic devices. Consequently, the proposed watermarking approach can be applied to help combat piracy without bothering innocent users with unnatural distortions.