To solve the inadequate imperceptibility of reversible video watermarking and lacking of tamper localization

we present a novel reversible watermarking algorithm based on an intra-prediction mode. The proposed algorithm elaborately analyzes the sensitivity of the luminance prediction mode to different types of tampering of the I frame

extracts the prediction mode of each intra macro block

and generates a signature with the prediction mode. According to the features of a H.264/AVC codec

the minimum error coefficient in each 4×4 luminance residual block is selected with an error compensation method. Finally

feature information is embedded as watermarks in the selected coefficient by employing a difference expansion. Experimental results show that the original video can be recovered without any distortion if the watermarked video is not tampered; otherwise

the tampered region can be localized accurately

and the tamper localization accuracy is 4×4 blocks. Selected minimum error coefficients embedded with watermarks effectively reduce their impact on video quality. Compared with existing methods

the proposed algorithm improves the PSNRs of watermarked images by an average of 10%. Furthermore

the bit increase rate of the test sequence decreases by an average of 22%. Experimental results show that compared with previous reversible watermarking schemes for H.264/AVC

the proposed method not only achieves higher embedding capacity and better imperceptibility but also features greater accuracy in tampering detection. The proposed method can thus be applied in many fields

including the areas of medicine

military

and satellites.