Multiple Description Coding Using Data Hiding and Regions of Interest for Broadcasting Applications

We propose an innovative scheme for multiple description coding (MDC) with regions of interest (ROI) support to be adopted in high-quality television. The scheme proposes to split the stream into two separate descriptors and to preserve the quality of the region of interest, even in case one descriptor is completely lost. The residual part of the frame (the background) is instead modeled through a checkerboard pattern, alternating the strength of the quantization. The decoder is provided with the necessary side-information to reconstruct the frame properly, namely, the ROI parameters and location, via a suitable data hiding procedure. Using data hiding, reconstruction parameters are embedded in the transform coefficients, thus allowing an improvement in PSNR of the single descriptions at the cost of a negligible overhead. To demonstrate its effectiveness, the algorithm has been implemented in two different scenarios, using the reference H.264/AVC codec and an MJPEG framework to evaluate the performance in absence of motion-compensated frames on 720p video sequences

A New Uncompressed-Domain Video Watermarking Approach Robust to H.264/AVC Compression

In this paper, we present a new video watermarking approach which is robust to efficient video coding standards such as H.264/AVC. We show the contradiction between embedding watermarks in the irrelevant part of a video and using a lossy compression algorithm to reduce the video data rate. Because the compression algorithm removes irrelevant information, the watermark can not be recovered. To solve this problem, we propose the embedding of the watermark in the relevant part of the video but in an imperceptible manner. We realize this by changing the spatial position of object borders. We propose our new Normed Centre of Gravity (NCG) to describe these borders. Of course, lossy compression influences the NCG. We present a method to predict the strength of this influence. Hence, we can embed the watermark with a defined robustness to lossy compression. The watermarking is embedded by quantizing the NCG. We present a geometric warping process to quantize the NCG and embed the watermark payload with a defined robustness. To demonstrate the robustness we use the new and at present most efficient available compression standard H.264/AVC