A Scalable Architecture for Uncompressed-Domain Watermarked Videos

• Published in: IEEE transactions on information forensics and security Vol. 14; no. 6; pp. 1432 - 1444
• Main Authors: Mareen, Hannes, De Praeter, Johan, Van Wallendael, Glenn, Lambert, Peter
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.06.2019; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Coders; Coding; Complexity; Computation; Computational complexity; Computer architecture; Distributors; Encoding; low complexity; Multimedia; Transforms; Video compression; video security; Videos; Watermarking
• ISSN: 1556-6013; 1556-6021
• DOI: 10.1109/TIFS.2018.2879301

Video watermarking is a well-established technology to help identify digital pirates when they illegally re-distribute multimedia content. In order to provide every client with a unique, watermarked video, the traditional distribution architectures separately encode each watermarked video. However, since these encodings require a high amount of computational resources, such architectures do not scale well to a large number of users. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel architecture that uses fast encoders instead of traditional, full encoders. The fast encoders re-use the coding information from a single, previously-encoded, unwatermarked video in order to speed up the encodings of the watermarked videos. As a result, the complexity of a fast encoder is only a fraction of the complexity of a full encoder. Due to a high correlation of the re-used coding information with the optimal coding information, the compression efficiency and watermark robustness decrease only slightly. Most importantly, the proposed fast encoder speeds up the compression process with a factor of 115, resulting in a low complexity similar to that of a video decoder. Consequently, video distributors can use the proposed architecture to deliver high-quality watermarked videos on a large-scale without requiring an excessive amount of computational resources.