The University of British Columbia

A watermarking scheme that discourages theater camcorder piracy through the enforcement of playback control is presented. In this method, the video is watermarked so that its display is not permitted if a compliant video player detects the watermark. A watermark that is robust to geometric distortions (rotation, scaling, cropping) and lossy compression is required in order to block access to media content that has been re-recorded with a camera inside a movie theater. We introduce a new video watermarking algorithm for playback control that takes advantage of the properties of the dual-tree complex wavelet transform. This transform offers the advantages of the regular and the complex wavelets (perfect reconstruction, shift invariance, and good directional selectivity). Our method relies on these characteristics to create a watermark that is robust to geometric distortions and lossy compression. The proposed scheme is simple to implement and outperforms comparable methods when tested against geometric distortions.