We are happy that our paper titled “Watermarking for Large-Scale Video Distribution through Out-of-the-Loop Frame Replacement” was accepted at the European Workshop on Visual Information Processing (EUVIP) 2022.
Hannes Mareen presented this research on 14 September 2022 in Lisbon, Portugal. The poster can be viewed below, and a higher-resolution version can be found here.
The poster to be presented at EUVIP 2022. Higher-resolution version can be found here.
Forensic watermarking is used in large-scale video-distribution applications to track digital pirates after they illegally leak videos. Existing methods either have a high embedding complexity or have troubles providing imperceptibility and robustness.
Therefore, this paper proposes a novel watermarking method that has a low embedding complexity, as well as sufficient imperceptibility and robustness. The main novelty is that frames are replaced out of the loop, which has a very low complexity. This is inspired by A/B watermarking, yet applied on frame level rather than video-segment level. That is, we replace the frames from donor videos watermarked using rate-distortion-preserving watermarks (proposed in previous work). The resulting drift-error artifacts are used for robust watermark detection. Additionally, a faster watermark detection method is proposed at the cost of a decrease in embedding capacity.
We show that the drift errors caused by frame replacement are imperceptible, and that our method has a negligible impact on the video bitrate. Moreover, we demonstrate a high level of robustness. These interesting properties come at the cost of a non-blind detection with a relatively high complexity, that is partially solved by the proposed fast detection method. Additionally, a high detection complexity is not necessarily a problem since detection occurs infrequently and recent speed-up solutions exist.
In conclusion, the proposed method is a novel and scalable solution that enables secure large-scale video distribution.
