Data hiding of motion information in chroma and luma samples for video compression

2010 appears to be the launching date for new compression activities intended to challenge the current video compression standard H.264/AVC. Several improvements of this standard are already known like competition-based motion vector prediction. However the targeted 50% bitrate saving for equivalent quality is not yet achieved. In this context, this paper proposes to reduce the signaling information resulting from this vector competition, by using data hiding techniques. As data hiding and video compression traditionally have contradictory goals, a study of data hiding is first performed. Then, an efficient way of using data hiding for video compression is proposed. The main idea is to hide the indices into appropriately selected chroma and luma transform coefficients. To minimize the prediction errors, the modification is performed via a rate-distortion optimization. Objective improvements (up to 2.3% bitrate saving) and subjective assess ment of chroma loss are reported and analyzed for several sequences.