An implementation of a technology is described herein for the protection of rights
in the content of a video sequence. This technology further generally relates to
a technology facilitating embedding imperceptible, de-synchronization-resistant
watermarks in video sequence and facilitating detecting such watermarks. These
watermarks are resistant against unintentional and intentional modifications. In
particular, the watermarks are resistant to de-synchronization. In addition, the
watermarks are perceptually invisible. The watermarks are hidden in the video so
that flicker is minimized or eliminated. More specifically, this technology hides
a watermark (of portions thereof) over one or more regions of successive frames.
Each region has a center defined by a hash value. A watermark (of portions thereof)
is encoded into the region in a "plateau" manner. The mark (of portions thereof)
is fully encoded in the frames surrounding the region's center, but trail off towards
the edges of the region. This abstract itself is not intended to limit the scope
of this patent. The scope of the present invention is pointed out in the appending claims.
