Video watermarking capacity in the DWT hierarchy

Video watermarking enforces property right for digital video: a mark is transparently embedded into original data. The true owner is identified by detecting this mark. The robust watermarking techniques allow the mark detection even when the protected video is attacked. Generally, the better the transparency and robustness, the smaller the mark size. We evaluate the maximum theoretical quantity of information which can be inserted into the 2D-DWT coefficient hierarchy, for prescribed transparency and robustness constraints. In order to ensure the accuracy in capacity evaluation, our paper do not relay on any assumption concerning the noise model. Instead, it carries out an in-depth analysis on the statistical behaviour of the real life attacks (StirMark, Gaussian filtering, sharpening, rotation). The experiments are performed on 10 low rate video sequences of 30 minutes each and compares among them three types of bi-orthogonal DWT, namely the (2,2), (4,4), and (9,7). The overall results (theoretical and experimental) are discussed not only for conventional watermarking applications, but for hidden channel, indexing and retrieval applications, as well.