A Robust Watermarking Method for Mpeg-4 Based on Kurtosis

Abstract

Watermarking is a method of data hiding in relation to information security and copyright protection. In this paper, a new kurtosis-based watermarking approach is proposed for compressed video files. The proposed approach has two main parts. First, an intraframe of the video file is transformed from RGB to YCbCr color space and each Y component's kurtosis value is calculated. A threshold kurtosis value is determined for the video because it is recommended to interpret the kurtosis values in combination with noise and resolution measurement. Secondly, the middle band Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficients of the luminance (Y) component is used for watermarking processes considering the threshold kurtosis values. Each bit of the binary watermark is embedded in a different DCT block. The experimental results show that the proposed method can be safely used for watermarking processes when the point of interest is binary watermarks. In addition, the proposed watermarking approach is highly imperceptible and robust. Statistical and perceptual quality evaluations show that the proposed approach is better than its counterparts.