A Cover Selection HEVC Video Steganography Based on Intra Prediction Mode

Existing video steganography puts much emphasis on the design of algorithms such as mapping rules or distortion functions, thereby ignoring the selection of cover to embed secret information. However, this is just one of the major differences between image steganography and video steganography. In addition, since HEVC is the latest standard in the video codec field, it is of important academic significance and applied value to study HEVC-based steganography. This paper proposes a novel video steganography in HEVC, based on intra-prediction mode (IPM). Firstly, this paper analyzes the probability distribution of 4 × 4 IPMs. Then a cover selection rule combined with the Coding Unit (CU) and Prediction Unit (PU) coding information is proposed, which can improve the security performance of a stego video stream. In addition, matrix coding is used as a coding example to implement the steganography on HEVC video streams. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can not only maintain the video quality and the security performance but is also easy to implement. Furthermore, the proposed cover selection rule can also be integrated into other HEVC IPM based steganography.