Robust Reversible Watermarking Scheme in Video Compression Domain Based on Multi-Layer Embedding

Most of the existing research on video watermarking schemes focus on improving the robustness of watermarking. However, in application scenarios such as judicial forensics and telemedicine, the distortion caused by watermark embedding on the original video is unacceptable. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a robust reversible watermarking (RRW)scheme based on multi-layer embedding in the video compression domain. Firstly, the watermarking data are divided into several sub-secrets by using Shamir’s (t, n)-threshold secret sharing. After that, the chroma sub-block with more complex texture information is filtered out in the I-frame of each group of pictures (GOP), and the sub-secret is embedded in that frame by modifying the discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients within the sub-block. Finally, the auxiliary information required to recover the coefficients is embedded into the motion vector of the P-frame of each GOP by a reversible steganography algorithm. In the absence of an attack, the receiver can recover the DCT coefficients by extracting the auxiliary information in the vectors, ultimately recovering the video correctly. The watermarking scheme demonstrates strong robustness even when it suffers from malicious attacks such as recompression attacks and requantization attacks. The experimental results demonstrate that the watermarking scheme proposed in this paper exhibits reversibility and high visual quality. Moreover, the scheme surpasses other comparable methods in the robustness test session.