Use of a spectral secondary container in a video protection method based on phase watermarks

A new method for video protection using phase digital watermarks is proposed in this work. Unlike the previously described method, it employs a secondary container (a discrete Fourier spectrum) that provides additional security for video content. The protective information (a binary QR code) is embedded into the discrete spectrum of the watermark, which is then converted into a spatial domain representation as a halftone image visually resembling noise. This image is subsequently embedded into the phases of time-varying sinusoids. The paper presents experiments analyzing the dependence of watermark extraction accuracy on the amount of embedded data and its quality. It also examines the possibility of placing the QR code in different regions of the discrete spectrum. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and its robustness against compression using the H.264 codec. In conclusion, we compare the efficiency of the proposed method with that of the original phase watermarking approach.