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A low cost fragile watermarking scheme in H.264/AVC compressed domain

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Abstract

H.264/AVC-based products have grown tremendously in social networks; issues of content-based authentication become increasingly important. This paper presents a blind fragile watermarking scheme for content-based H.264/AVC authentication, which enjoys high sensitivity to typical video attacks. A spatiotemporal analysis is exploited to guarantee a minimum impact on perceptual quality and bit-rate increment. The watermark features are extracted from intra/inter prediction modes of intra/inter macroblocks, constituting the content-based Message Authentication Code (MAC) which is embedded/extracted in a Group-of-Pictures GOP-based fashion utilizing the syntactic elements of the Network Application Layer (NAL) units from the compressed bitstream. It’s unnecessary to fully decode a compressed bitstream before the embedding or detection processes. A content-based key is generated to control fragile watermark generation, embedding, extraction, and verification algorithms. Additionally, fragility is ensured by selecting the last nonzero quantized ac residuals for watermark embedding. The embedded watermark can be detected and verified by means of partially decoding intra/inter prediction modes from syntactic elements of the bitstream without the prior knowledge of the original video or complete decoding. Experiment results demonstrate that the performance of the proposed scheme is excellent in terms of bit-rate and perceptual quality. Furthermore, various types of content-preserving and/or content-changing attacks can be detected efficiently.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by the National Science Council under contract number NSC101-2221-E-011-063-MY3 and it was also partially supported by the 111 Project under the grant No. 111-2-14, One Hundred Talents Program 2012, Sichuan Province. M. E. Farfoura is currently a system analyst with the Information Technology Center- Royal Scientific Society, Jordan-Amman. The work of X. Wang was supported by the National Science Foundation of China under Grants 60902023 and 61171096, as well as by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under the Grant SWJTU12CX093.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Science and Technology, Southwest Jiaotong University, 610031, Chengdu, People’s Republic of China

    Shi-Jinn Horng, Pingzhi Fan, Xian Wang & Tianrui Li

  2. Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei, 106, Taiwan

    Shi-Jinn Horng & Mahmoud E. Farfoura

  3. Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei, 106, Taiwan

    Jing-Ming Guo

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  1. Shi-Jinn Horng
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  2. Mahmoud E. Farfoura
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  3. Pingzhi Fan
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  4. Xian Wang
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  5. Tianrui Li
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  6. Jing-Ming Guo
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Correspondence to Shi-Jinn Horng.

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Horng, SJ., Farfoura, M.E., Fan, P. et al. A low cost fragile watermarking scheme in H.264/AVC compressed domain. Multimed Tools Appl 72, 2469–2495 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-013-1561-2

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