Performance Analysis of Tracing Watermarking in the YST Domain for 3G Video-on-Demand Applications

In the last years, tracing watermarking has been proposed as a technique to provide a blind measure of the quality of service of the communication link, focusing on multimedia communication scenarios. This paper is focused on 3G video-on-demand (VOD) communication scenarios. We have exploited the new color space YST, recently introduced in the literature, where the luminance component (Y) is the same as in conventional YUV space, while the vectors S and T lie within the chrominance (UV) plane. In particular, the third component T, defined as orthogonal to the YS plane, is chosen as the channel for the embedding process (instead of the Y channel). The results show the benefits obtained in digital watermarking by the new representation versus the conventional approach, i.e. the YUV color space. The main contribution of our work is twofold: the sensitivity of the YST representation outperforms the conventional one in terms of both quality (i.e. minimization of the alterations endured by the video during the embedding process) and security issues (i.e. detection of the watermark). Hence, the proposed procedure can be suitably applied for watermarking of 3G video-on-demand applications.