Copyright Protection of Color Video Using Digital Watermarking Majid Masoumi 1 , Shervin Amiri 2 1 Electrical Engineering Department, Islamic Azad University Qazvin Branch, Qazvin, Iran 2 Scientific Member of E.E. Department, Iranian Research Organization for Science and Technology (IROST), Tehran, Iran Abstract A huge amount of digital multimedia data is broadcasted daily over the internet. Since digital data can be easily duplicated, intellectual property right protection techniques have become an important issue. In this study, a robust algorithm based on DWT for video copyright protection is proposed. Firstly, the RGB video is converted into YUV color component video, then, in order to make the watermark imperceptible, the luminance layer is only used to embed the watermark and the chrominance layer is left unchanged. In this algorithm, DWT is performed on both watermark image and video I- frames. Using a multiplicative hiding method, watermark image is embedded in its corresponding frequency coefficients of DWT in video I-frames. Based on experimental results the presented method maintains the high transparency of video stream meanwhile resist the watermark against a variety of attacks like: noisy attacks, filtering attacks, blurring attack and compression attacks. Keywords: Video Watermarking, Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), Intra-Frame. 1. Introduction With dramatic growth of the Internet and multimedia systems in distributed environments, it is easier for digital data owners to transfer multimedia documents across the Internet. Therefore, there is an increase in concern over copyright protection of digital contents [1-4]. Traditionally, encryption and control access techniques were employed to protect the ownership of media. These techniques, however, do not protect against unauthorized copying after the media have been successfully transmitted and decrypted. Recently, watermark techniques are utilized to maintain the copyright [4-7].Multimedia and network security issues are classically handled through cryptography, however, cryptography ensures confidentiality, authenticity, and integrity only when a message is transmitted through a public channel such as an open network. It does not protect against unauthorized copying after the message has been successfully transmitted. Digital watermarking is an effective way to protect copyright of multimedia data even after its transmission. Watermarking is a concept of embedding a special pattern, watermark, into a multimedia document so that a given piece of copyright information is permanently tied to the data. This information can later prove the ownership, identify a misappropriating person, trace the marked document’s dissemination through the network, or simply inform users about the rights-holder or the permitted use of the data [6]. The purpose of a digital watermark is to embed auxiliary information into a digital signal by making small changes that are not perceptible to its intended recipient. For instance, in the case of multimedia watermarking, the hidden signal should not result in any visible or audible distortions. Because the embedded signals enable invisible tags to be attached to digital documents, watermarks are powerful tools that will play a significant role in solving the growing digital property identification problem [8]. Numerous inventive watermarking approaches have been proposed in these few years and most of them focus on digital image watermarking. A variety of watermarking techniques have been proposed to embed a robust watermark into digital images .These techniques can be divided into two main categories according to the embedding domain of the cover image: the spatial domain methods and the transform domain methods. The spatial domain methods are the earliest and simplest watermarking techniques but they have a low information hiding capacity, and the watermark can be easily erased by lossy compression. On the other hand, the transform domain approaches insert the watermark into the transform coefficients of the original image “cover”, yielding more information embedding and more robustness against watermarking attacks. Recent popular transforms contain the discrete cosine transform (DCT) [4], the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) [5], and the discrete Fourier transform (DFT). Image watermarking techniques can be extended easily to watermark video image sequences [6, 7]. For digital watermarking of video, different characteristics of the IJCSI International Journal of Computer Science Issues, Vol. 9, Issue 4, No 2, July 2012 ISSN (Online): 1694-0814 www.IJCSI.org 91 Copyright (c) 2012 International Journal of Computer Science Issues. All Rights Reserved.