Watermarking on spread multi-frame data video using discrete wavelet transform hybrid and frame ratio message variance

Abstract

The exponential growth of video sharing demands secure and imperceptible watermarking methods. This study presents a video watermarking framework using discrete wavelet transform (DWT) with hybrid sub-band embedding and multi-frame allocation to balance imperceptibility, capacity, and robustness. Watermark bits are adaptively distributed across low-low (LL), low-high (LH), and high-low (HL) sub-bands of selected frames, with uncompressed audio video interleave (AVI) ensuring coefficient integrity. Experiments on 640×360 videos show LL-only embedding achieves high imperceptibility (peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) > 38.6 dB, structural similarity index measure (SSIM) ≥ 0.9945, and bit error rate (BER) = 0), while LL-dominant hybrids increase capacity with slight robustness trade-offs. Embedding in LH and high-high (HH) sub-bands raises distortion vulnerability. Under cropping, BER rises from 0.005 to 0.205 (0–50%), and normalized correlation (NC) drops from 0.998 to 0.802, remaining acceptable for ≤30% cropping. The scheme resists joint photographic experts’ group (JPEG) compression quality factor 20–80 (Q20–Q80), resizing (≥70%), and mild Gaussian blur (3×3), maintaining efficient decoding under higher payloads. Future work may apply error-correction coding and redundancy-aware embedding for improved resilience. Overall, the proposed method offers a secure, adaptive, and efficient solution for video authentication and covert communication.