# MPEG and DA-AD Resilient DCT-Based Video Watermarking Using Adaptive Frame Selection
## 1 Introduction  
Digital technology has completely changed our lifestyles by providing several convenient digital tools; however, it has also created a plethora of problems, one of which is digital copyright infringement. Today, with the wide variety of available digital tools, digital content can be copied extremely easily, thereby facilitating the rapid spread of illegal digital content globally. Consequently, digital copyright protection has become an important issue. Digital watermarking is a process that changes a cover work invisibly to insert a secret message [1]. A major application of digital watermarking is the protection of intellectual property. In particular, digital watermarking provides robustness against analog hole piracy [2] when it is infeasible to protect original works of authorship using other protection techniques such as digital rights management (DRM).  
Several studies have been conducted on digital watermarking, and there have been several benchmarking attempts at creating watermarking systems [3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. The Information Hiding and its Criteria (IHC) Committee has been working to improve this situation by promoting the development of digital watermarking technology [7]. Specifically, its objective is to develop standard evaluation criteria and sponsor watermark competitions based on these criteria. As a part of this objective, a benchmarking study was conducted on various types of image, video, and audio watermarking, based on standardized criteria [8, 9, 10, 11, 12].  
This paper is a follow-up to our previous research [8], which described a robust video watermarking scheme based on discrete cosine transform (DCT) watermarking methodology. Herein, we present a robust watermarking system for video data and evaluate it based on standard criteria from IHC. The watermarking scheme achieves robustness against temporal desynchronization by adopting the adaptive selection of video frames for watermarking. In the adaptive frame selection, a secure watermark message is inserted, and the watermarked frame sequence is compressed based on the MPEG-4 part 10 codec (H.264). Subsequently, frames that are robust to lossy video compression are selectedfor the watermark message embedding. Herein, we adopt a DCT based watermarking based on a spread-spectrum methodology that is robust to lossy compression such as MPEG and JPEG, the addition of Gaussian and white noise, digital/analog-analog/digital (DA-AD) conversion, and uniform scaling. Thus, the inserted watermark message and bit sequences can resist various video processes. The evaluation results indicate that our watermarking scheme achieves not only perceptual invisibility but also robustness against non-hostile processes. The assessment of the developed watermarking scheme satisfies the 3 rd edition of the IHC video watermarking evaluation criteria [7].  
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we describe the background of this study, and in Section 3, the proposed watermarking method is provided. The experimental setup and results are presented in Section 4, and finally, in Section 5, we present some concluding remarks.