Development of a Robust Watermarking Scheme Against Recompression Attacks for AV1 Videos

This paper proposes an image-on-video watermarking scheme for videos compressed with the AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) format that is made robust against recompression attacks using Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) techniques. A Two-Dimensional DCT-transformed watermark was first embedded in the high frequency region of each similarly transformed frame of the test sequences. The base watermarked sequences and their attacked copies were then subjected to extractions to determine the robustness of the embedded payload. On average, the embedding algorithm created watermarked videos with fair levels of distortion in terms of Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), and excellent perceptual quality in terms of Video Multimethod Assessment Fusion (VMAF) scores. Upon extraction, the retrieved images had high fidelities with the designed watermark, as computed in terms of Structural Similarity Index Measure, even with those from the attacked videos. The Embedding Capacity Ratio per Frame (ECRF) of the scheme was calculated to be within the typical range of values of watermarking for security and documentation purposes.