Complete Video Quality Preserving Data Hiding for Multimedia Indexing
KokSheik Wong, Kiyoshi Tanak · Multimedia · 2010
A novel data hiding method that completely preserves the image quality of the host video was proposed in the compressed video domain. During video playback, the modified video completely reconstructs the original video even compared at the bit-to-bit level. This method is reversible where the original video could be restored from the modified video. RZL (reserve zerorun length) data representation scheme was proposed to improve the embedding efficiency by trading off with payload. It was theoretically and experimentally verified that RZL outperforms matrix encoding in terms of payload and embedding efficiency. Basic performance of this method was evaluated using various MPEG-1 compressed videos. Results suggest that, approximately 55.9%, 24.0% and 23.6% of all MBs are usable for data embedding in I, P and B-pictures, respectively, which is sufficient for applications including indexing and annotation. The video bitstream size increases up to 40% when operating at full-capacity and this can be suppressed by RZL or any of the two independent solutions proposed. In the best case scenario, an average increase of four bits in the video bitstream size is observed for every message bit embedded. As future works, we seek for possible extensions of our data hiding method to withstand hostile environment so that the embedded message could still be extracted after common image processing attacks. We should explore complete quality preserving data hiding in other domains such as still picture and audio. At the same time, we should succeed in suppressing video bitstream size increment due to data embedding without sacrificing payload. We also seek for the applications of RZL in other data hiding domains.