A high bitrate information hiding algorithm for digital video content under H.264/AVC compression

With the proliferation of digital multimedia content, such as image, audio, video, and animation, information hiding techniques have attracted more and more research interests. High bitrate information hiding is different from digital watermarking in that it tries to hide relatively large amount of auxiliary information instead of just one or a few verification bits. This research is mainly focused on high bitrate information hiding within digital video content. Channel capacity and the robustness of hidden information against lossy video codec are the two main concerns. In the proposed algorithm, 1 bit is hidden within each 4*4 DCT coefficient block by means of vector quantization. Low-frequency coefficients are chosen for information hiding due to their relatively large amplitudes and the corresponding small step sizes in the quantization matrix. The proposed algorithm is tested under H.264/AVC (advanced video codec), which is the state-of-the-art video coding standard. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is very robust and a very high percentage of the hidden information survives H.264/AVC compression. It is also observed that hidden information within different types of frame/slice have different levels of robustness against H.264/AVC compression.