Selective Embedding and Forbidden Zone Data Hiding for Strong Video Data Thrashing
R. Ravi Kumar, Vijaya Kumar, Sri Mittapalli · 2013
A new method for high capacity data hiding in H.264 streams takes advantage of the different block sizes used by the H.264 encoder during the inter prediction stage in order to hide the desirable data. This fragile data hiding approach can be mainly used for content-based authentication and covert communication. Information-theoretic analyses for data hiding prescribe embedding the hidden data in the choice of quantizer for the host data. The hidden data can be recovered reliably under attacks, such as compression and limited amounts of image tampering and image resizing. The three main findings are as follows. 1) In order to limit perceivable distortion while hiding large amounts of data. 2) The use of local criteria to choose where to hide data can potentially cause desynchronization of the encoder and decoder. 3) For simplicity, scalar quantization- based hiding is employed, even though information-theoretic guidelines prescribe vector quantization-based methods. We begin with a review of two major types of embedding, based on which we propose a new multilevel embedding framework to allow the amount of extractable data to be adaptive according to the actual noise condition. We propose a new video data hiding method that makes use of erasure correction capability of repeat accumulate codes and superiority of forbidden zone data hiding. Selective embedding is utilized in the proposed method to determine host signal samples suitable for data hiding. The decoding error values are reported for typical system parameters. The simulation results indicate that the framework can be successfully utilized in video data hiding applications.