A Watermarking Method by Modifying QTCs for HEVC

With rapid development and application in the new video compression standard HEVC, it is necessary new digital watermarking technology capable of application for HEVC. In this paper, we propose a new watermarking method by modifying QTCs (Quantized Transform Coefficients) for HEVC. In proposed method, the watermark is embedded by modifying non-zero QTCs (Quantized Transform Coefficients) of the 4×4 luma transform block of intra predicted I-frame. In order to resist error drift phenomena, we differently modify the significant bits of 4×4 luma block with its direction of intra prediction modes. In decoder, the embedding watermark bits can extract without the need of any extra information. The experimental results show that proposed method is low in computational complexity and is efficiently resist error drift.