Exhibition QIM-based watermarking for digital cinema

The copyright protection of digital cinema requires the insertion of forensic watermarks during exhibition playback. This paper presents a low-complexity exhibition watermarking method based on quantization index modulation (QIM) and embedded in the DCI compliant decoder. Watermark embedding is proposed to fit in the JPEG2000 decoding process, prior to the inverse wavelet transform and such as it has a minimal impact on the image quality, guarantying a strong link between decompression and watermarking. The watermark is embedded by using an adaptive-spread transform dither modulation (STDM) method, based on a new multi-resolution perceptual masking to adapt watermark strength. Watermark detection is thereafter performed over the wavelet transformation of the recovered images. The proposed approach offers a wide range of channel capacities according to robustness to several kinds of distortions while maintaining a low computational complexity. Watermarking detection performance on digital cinema pictures captured with a video camera from a viewing room has been preliminary assessed, showing very promising results. The proposed approach provides high levels of imperceptibility, yet good robustness to degradations resulting from camcorder exhibition capture, to common signal processing operations such as filtering or re-sampling, and to very high compression.