An improved DCT-based perturbation scheme for high capacity data hiding in H.264/AVC intra frames

High Embedding Capacity Data Hiding Algorithm for H.264/AVC Video Sequences without Intraframe Distortion Drift

“…To further improve the embedding capacity of Ma et al 's scheme while avoiding the distortion drift in the H.264/AVC video sequences, Lin et al [18] have divided the relationship of the reference pixels and the selected prediction modes into five categories presented in Table 1. Then, for the block belongs to three categories, i.e., Cat 1 , Cat 2 , and Cat 4 , Lin et al extracted one more coefficient pair for embedding one more secret bit by the same way as was done by Ma et al 's scheme.…”

“…As a result, the embedding capacity obtained by Lin et al 's scheme is 0.15 bits per pixel (bpp) higher than that of Ma et al 's scheme. However, in these two schemes [17,18], each pair of quantized DCT coefficients is subsequently perturbed to embed only one secret bit. Thus, to embed secret bits, n selected pairs of quantized DCT coefficients are modified.…”

“…After Richardson introduced the H.264/AVC video compression standard [8] in 2003, this standard has been used extensively for hiding secret data [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19]. In 2005, Noorkami et al [9] proposed a low complexity watermarking algorithm by using the relative change of the DC coefficients of the 4 × 4 block.…”

“…However, unsatisfactory embedding capacity was obtained by their scheme. To increase the embedding capacity of Ma et al 's scheme, Lin et al [18] fully used the remaining luminance blocks to hide the secret data. Their experimental results indicated that their embedding capacity was improved further when the increase of embedding capacity obtained by Lin et al 's scheme is 0.15 bits per pixel (bpp) more than that of Ma et al 's scheme.…”

“…Their experimental results indicated that their embedding capacity was improved further when the increase of embedding capacity obtained by Lin et al 's scheme is 0.15 bits per pixel (bpp) more than that of Ma et al 's scheme. However, the average embedding capacity of these two schemes [17,18] is still low, i.e., always smaller than 0.68 bpp, because they use a pair of DCT coefficients to hide the secret bit separately. By doing so, as the amount of embedded secret data increases, the the distortion of the video becomes greater.…”