High-bitrate multimedia information hiding for digital image/video under lossy compression

With the proliferation of digital multimedia content, information hiding techniques have attracted more and more research interests. Information hiding not only hides the content and location of the protected data, but also hides its very existence. High-bitrate information hiding is different from digital watermarking in that it tries to hide relatively large amounts of auxiliary information instead of just one or a few verification bits. This research is mainly concerned with channel capacity and robustness to lossy image/video codec. In the proposed DCT (discrete cosine transformation) domain algorithm, 1 bit is hidden within each 8 x 8 DCT coefficient block by means of vector quantization. A mathematical model has been proposed to predict the bit error rate (BER) of the algorithm under transformation-based lossy compression. The channel capacity can be increased 4-fold with further performance improvement. Digital video information hiding is a natural extension of digital image information hiding. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is very robust to lossy image/video codec. It is also observed that hidden information within different types of frames/slices have different levels of robustness against H.264/AVC compression. The proposed algorithm shall be very useful in practical applications such as side information delivery, captioning, video-in-video, and speech-in-video. (c) 2007 SPIE and IS&T.