A secure HEVC video watermarking scheme for authentication and copyright purposes

High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) becomes one of the widely deployed standards for multimedia applications. However, HEVC streams can be easily tampered by any third party, which negatively affects the authentication and copyright protection. Existing watermarking schemes used for copyright purpose are not able to protect the copyright information, especially if the hosting video encountered some intentional and/or unintentional attacks, such as recompression attack, lossy channel attacks, signal processing attacks, frame deletion attack, and image processing attacks. In addition, existing watermarking schemes used for authentication purpose are mostly suffering from the inability to detect recompression attack, especially if it uses the same quantisation parameters as the original compression. Further, existing watermarking schemes are suffering from the inability to locate tampering in videos. Moreover, some of those schemes could allow unauthorized access over an insecure channel, which is considered a serious security issue. In order to solve these issues, two HEVC video watermarking schemes are proposed; (1) a zero-fragile watermarking scheme based on sensitive watermarking zone and (2) a robust watermarking based on invariant watermarking zone. Additionally, the error correction code and cryptography techniques are applied to the watermark information to increase robustness and security over insecure channels. The first proposed scheme shows enough sensitivity to successfully detect video tampering, distinguish between intentional and unintentional attacks, and differentiate between first and second video compression at different bitrate, with accuracy improvement up to 42% compared to the-state-of-the-art schemes. Moreover, the second proposed scheme shows significant improvement; up to 8.23% of robustness against recompression attack, 95% against channel noise attacks, and 5.37% against frame deletion attack compared to the state�of-the-art schemes. Additionally, both proposed schemes are capable to maintain high visual quality, minimum bitrate increase, and high embedding capacity. Furthermore, both proposed schemes can localise tampering and prevent unauthorized access to watermarked information even over insecure channels

HEVC watermarking techniques for authentication and copyright applications: challenges and opportunities

Recently, High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC/H.265) has been chosen to replace previous video coding standards, such as H.263 and H.264. Despite the efficiency of HEVC, it still lacks reliable and practical functionalities to support authentication and copyright applications. In order to provide this support, several watermarking techniques have been proposed by many researchers during the last few years. However, those techniques are still suffering from many issues that need to be considered for future designs. In this paper, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) is introduced to identify HEVC challenges and potential research directions for interested researchers and developers. The time scope of this SLR covers all research articles published during the last six years starting from January 2014 up to the end of April 2020. Forty-two articles have met the criteria of selection out of 343 articles published in this area during the mentioned time scope. A new classification has been drawn followed by an identification of the challenges of implementing HEVC watermarking techniques based on the analysis and discussion of those chosen articles. Eventually, recommendations for HEVC watermarking techniques have been listed to help researchers to improve the existing techniques or to design new efficient ones

Recent methods and techniques in video watermarking and their applicability to the next generation video codec

High efficiency video coding (HEVC) is the newest video coding generation of the ITU-T and ISO/IEC, which first appeared in January 2013. It has the advantage of reducing the bit rate by as much as 50 % when compared to H.264 while maintaining the same visual quality. In the last decade, authentication and copyright protection methodologies have become one of the essential items in order to protect video contents by embedding within an efficient video codec. Thus, the objective of this paper is to revise recent developments in the area of watermarking techniques for video coding schemes and their applicability to the new Standard HEVC. The results of this study provide motivation to achieve a higher embedding capacity and higher compression performance for HEVC compared to H.264/AVC especially, for low bitrate coding