Ensuring security of H.264 videos by using watermarking

Watermarking is known to be a very difficult task. Robustness, Distortion, Payload, Security, Complexity are many constraints to deal with. When applied to a video stream, the difficulty seems to be growing in comparison to image watermarking. Many classical non malicious manipulations of a compressed stream may suppress the embedded information. For example, a simple re-compression of a DVD movie (MPEG2 compression) to a DivX movie will defeat most of the current state-of-the-art watermarking systems. In this talk, we will expose the different techniques in order to watermark a video compressed stream. Before, we will present the H.264/AVC standard which is one of the most powerful video-compression algorithms. The discussion about video watermarking will be illustrated with H.264 streams. The specific example of traitor tracing will be presented. Deadlocks will be discussed, and then the possible extensions and the future applications will conclude the presentation.