TABLE OF CONTENTS Alessandro Piva, Roberto Caldelli, and Mauro Barni
This chapter aims at giving an introduction to some general problems related to video watermarking. First of all the importance of video watermarking is reviewed by making reference to possible application scenarios, including DVD protection, broadcast monitoring, indexing, annotation, object based video protection. The main differences and similarities with respect to still image watermarking are introduced and carefully discussed.
Then we classify the possible approaches to video watermarking into broad categories. A first distinction is made between techniques operating in the raw and in the compressed domain. We review the main advantages and drawbacks of both the approaches and present some case studies to better illustrate the concepts we introduced. Case studies will consider watermarking in the spatial as well as in the frequency domain.
As a second perspective, we consider systems operating frame by frame and systems watermarking the video sequence as a whole. Once again we review the main weakness and strengths of both the approaches and illustrate them by means of a couple of examples.
In the last part of the chapter we consider watermarking of video objects for the protection of MPEG4 video streams, or part of them. By following the same approach used in the previous sections, we first discuss the main...
