A novel piracy protection scheme for videos using force-induced pixels

In this paper, a novel reversible keyless invisible authentication method is proposed for video piracy protection which uses randomized pixel at Red color channel for hiding information with locations of such modified pixels being stored in an immediate next frame. Each pair of these frames is identified with an embedded random number and an alphabet “A” or “B” based on hidden information frame and location information frame respectively. Such randomization at two different levels is not considered in any of the existing methods. Videos with this proposed embedding of copyright information ensure minimum distortions and maximum resistance to the removal of authentication information thereby providing an effective control of the rampant piracy menace. Keyless invisible embedding process increases the security and reduces the cost. Modified Least Significant Bit (LSB) based mechanism is used for achieving cost effectiveness and simplicity. The extracted information will be compared to assure the authenticity of videos. The average Euclidean distance between original and authenticated frames’ histogram is 2.5902e-10 that implies high similarity and thereby increasing its ability to withstand visual attacks. The proposed method results in PSNR greater than 50 dB with MSE less than 0.001 leading to high resultant image quality after embedding. High level of robustness is achieved due to the inherent mechanism of storing authentication information across all pairs of frame as well as complete randomization of the authentication storing pixels. In case of eavesdropping, using Bit-tolerance and Frame-tolerance we can confirm whether the corrupted video is acceptable or not. © 2020, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.