Data Hiding in H.264/AVC Streams with Limited Intra-Frame Distortion Drift

A novel data-hiding scheme with limited intra-frame distortion drift is proposed to hide information in H.264/AVC digital video. The secret message is embedded into the quantized DCT (discrete cosine transform) coefficients of 4×4 residual luma blocks in I frames. By analysis of the relationship between the DCT coefficients and the distortion of the pixel values used in intra-frame prediction, we choose suitable DCT coefficients for embedding and compensate the intra-frame distortion by adjusting another DCT coefficient. The experimental results show that our scheme can effectively control intra-frame distortion drift and get higher visual quality. Besides, the mechanism to choose DCT coefficients can be combined with other data hiding algorithms in H.264/AVC to control intraframe distortion drift.