Forensic watermarks can be inserted into a video asset using compressed domain preprocessing.

Additionally, watermark preprocessing, also known as watermark generation, enables a greater level of security for watermarking. Compressed watermarking is preferred over spatial watermarking because decompression and compression of video data may not always be possible due to high storage capacity requirements for compressed watermarking. An MPEG stream that has been reencoded significantly increases processing time, making it unsuitable for real-time applications where embedding processes take place in parallel with compression.

Compressed-domain video watermarking, on the other hand, is constrained by the growing computational complexity and the limited amount of watermarking information available (going beyond the capacity of watermarking information might enhance the bit-rate of the watermarked video). Since video compression standards such as MPEG-2, MPEG-4, AVC/H.264, HEVC/H.265, and others like them modify their structure in various ways, watermarking schemes can be implemented as part of the compression process.

The coding rate of MPEG is between 3 Mbit/s and 100 Mbit/s, making it suitable for both standard digital television and high definition television. There are at least two elementary streams in each MPEG-2 and MPEG-1 system stream, namely an audio stream and a video stream. Multi-stream watermarking is essential in an OTT environment where DRM protected content is being pushed, and an effective watermarking system should be able to handle this. Once the original stream has been demultiplexed, it is typically processed to embed the watermark in the audio and video streams. In order to create the final MPEG stream, the watermarked elementary streams are re-multiplexed. However, the computational cost and complexity of this approach are quite high. The result is that a large number of watermarking algorithms in the compressed domain only perform partial decoding in their embedding process and deal with the multiplexed stream itself.

As part of MPEG-4, H.264 is a highly compressed digital video codec standard that has a higher data compression ratio and video picture quality.. DCT coefficients are a common place for watermarks in AVC/H.264-based watermarking schemes. In terms of compression, H.265 is the successor to H.264, and it performs better than its predecessor. Using half the original bandwidth, it is possible to play a video of the same quality over a network while using less bandwidth.

Using a cloud-based watermark extraction service that works well even with low-quality and recompressed videos, it is possible to verify the owner of the content and track down the source of the piracy. Client-side watermarking, A/B or manifest-level watermarking, and bitstream-based watermarking are three broad categories of watermarking solutions.

An effective video watermarking service must be able to deter piracy, identify the piracy outlets, and take the necessary steps to prevent leakage of the video content. In order to detect piracy, keep an eye out for suspicious activity and compare the digital fingerprints of suspicious files to the production fingerprint. The watermarking software is then able to identify the watermark and extract the information contained therein. Resize and collusion attempts, for example, shouldn’t affect the robustness of the watermark. It should also remain legible even after the content has been altered. It’s also possible to take legal action after discovering the source of a stream that is being illegally downloaded.