Overview

Watermarking has been proposed to protect the copyright of multimedia data by hiding secret information robustly into digital products for many years. Given the high value of video content and considering the large amount of inherently redundant data between frames, the unbalance between the motion and motionless regions, and the real-time requirement in the video broadcasting case etc., watermarked video sequences are highly susceptible to pirate attacks such as frame averaging, frame swapping, statistical analysis, digital-analog (DA/AD) conversion, and lossy compression (MPEG). One of the most technical difficulties of it is the issue of how to resist geometrical distortions and frame dropping randomly, since it is difficult to extract the watermark content due to the loss of spatial and temporal synchronization. Hence, video watermarking poses some unique requirements not applicable to still image watermarking, and it is a technical challenge to present a robust video watermarking method.

This chapter will discuss the requirements and the problems of video watermarking in the video broadcasting case by following the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) Technical Requirements. We will review one of the first European Video Watermarking System, TALISMAN (Tracing Authors right by Labeling Image Service and Monitoring Access Network), which was capable of embedding and extracting invisible watermarks in real-time. While on the one hand the TALISMAN system proved to have satisfactory visual quality and robustness regarding compression on the other hand improvements were needed to meet the requirements of the EBU. We show results from our...