Complete video quality-preserving data hiding

Although many data hiding methods are proposed in the literature, all of them distort the quality of the host content during data embedding. In this paper, we propose a novel data hiding method in the compressed video domain that completely preserves the image quality of the host video while embedding information into it. Information is embedded into a compressed video by simultaneously manipulating Mquant and quantized discrete cosine transform coefficients, which are the significant parts of MPEG and H.26x-based compression standards. To the best of our knowledge, this data hiding method is the first attempt of its kind. When fed into an ordinary video decoder, the modified video completely reconstructs the original video even compared at the bit-to-bit level. Our method is also reversible, where the embedded information could be removed to obtain the original video. A new data representation scheme called reverse zerorun length (RZL) is proposed to exploit the statistics of macroblock for achieving high embedding efficiency while trading off with payload. It is theoretically and experimentally verified that RZL outperforms matrix encoding in terms of payload and embedding efficiency for this particular data hiding method. The problem of video bitstream size increment caused by data embedding is also addressed, and two independent solutions are proposed to suppress this increment. Basic performance of this data hiding method is verified through experiments on various existing MPEG-1 encoded videos. In the best case scenario, an average increase of four bits in the video bitstream size is observed for every message bit embedded. © 2009 IEEE.