Patent ID: 7298865

Claim:
A method for encoding watermark data into an image sequence, comprising: (a) identifying a set of one or more watermark carriers for potential use in encoding the watermark data into the image sequence; (b) analyzing content of the image sequence to identify a plurality of potential locations in the image sequence for encoding the watermark data into the image sequence, wherein each potential location corresponds to an acceptable encoding of a portion of the watermark data using a particular one of the watermark carriers in the set, wherein the set comprises at least one watermark carrier based on a spatio-temporal frequency pattern, having a frequency below a peak of a spatio-temporal contrast sensitivity function; (c) selecting a subset of the potential locations; and (d) for each selected location, modulating the corresponding watermark carrier by a portion of the watermark data and inserting the resulting modulated watermark carrier into the image sequence at the selected location.