Fujitsu is working on the use of video watermarking for digital marketing. In the case of advertising services in Japan, TV viewers can automatically access an E-commerce site synchronized with a home shopping network program and easily order a commodity of their choice by detecting the watermark embedded in the video they are watching with their smart device application. Since watermark signals are generally deteriorated by video compression, the watermark strength needs to be adjusted. In the TV broadcasting, the degree of deterioration is different depending on the form of broadcasting (e.g. digital terrestrial or satellite) because of the associated difference of bitrate and compression format. The complexity of adjusting the watermark strength to each broadcasting form for each video becomes a problem in the real operation while if the strength determined to overcome the largest deterioration is used for all other cases as well, the influence on the image quality of video compressed with a low compression rate may become greater than necessary. To reduce the above-mentioned inconvenience in practical use, we have developed a method that standardizes the strength for more applications than before by improving the trade-off between video compression tolerance and influence on the video quality.
Keizo Kato, Kensuke Kuraki, Ryuta Tanaka, "Improvement of trade-off between compression tolerance and perceptibility of video watermark for broadcasting" in Proc. IS&T Int’l. Symp. on Electronic Imaging: Media Watermarking, Security, and Forensics, 2016, https://doi.org/10.2352/ISSN.2470-1173.2016.8.MWSF-069