Complete video quality preserving data hiding with reversible functionality

This paper proposes a novel data hiding method in the MPEG domain where the image quality of the modified video is completely preserved to that of the original (compressed) video. To our best knowledge, there is no data hiding method that completely preserves the video quality after data embedding, and this method is the first attempt of its kind. This method is also reversible where the modifications done during data embedding could be undone to restore the original video. This method is applicable not only to existing MPEG1/2 encoded video streams but also to the encoding process of MPEG video from sequence of raw pictures. The problem of filesize increase as a result of data embedding is addressed, and three independent solutions are presented to suppress the filesize increase while trading off with payload and coding efficiency. Basic performance of this method is verified through experiments on various existing MPEG1 encoded videos.