A software/hardware secure watermarking scheme for Internet of Things applications

The security of applications that run over limited resources such as the Internet of Things becomes a new challenge for researchers. Digital watermarking (WM) is among the favorable solutions used to ensure the security for this type of applications, since it allows the integration of a message in a multimedia document without adding an overheard, as in classic encryption. This paper presents a software and hardware implementation WM scheme based on motion vectors to ensure copyright protection for a video sequence. To preserve the robustness of the proposed WM scheme, two security techniques are used: the digital WM to insert a watermark in the video and the scrambling technique for overall video protection. The watermark insertion is processed in the motion vectors. These vectors are generated during the motion estimation task using the four-step search block-matching algorithm. As a watermark, we use a binary sequence where only one bit is embedded into the horizontal and vertical components of the even motion vectors. The experimental results show that the proposed architecture preserves keeps the video quality with an average PSNR deviation rate of about 0.21dB and operates with low power consumption that did not exceed 119 mw and a maximum frequency of about 41.42 MHz.