Prediction mode modulated data-hiding algorithm for H.264/AVC

In this paper, a data-hiding algorithm with large data payload for H.264/AVC is proposed. The secret information is embedded by modulating the prediction modes of 4 x 4 luminance blocks. If the best mode does not match the information bit, the prediction mode should be modulated by replacing the best mode with the substitute mode. The substitute mode is the one with the least Lagrangian cost among those having different parity with the best mode. Due to high secrecy and easy reproducibility of chaos, the secret information is first encrypted by a chaotic sequence and then a small number of luminance blocks used for data embedding are randomly selected in each macroblock based on another chaotic sequence. The usefulness of multilevel chaotic keys and privacy of the number of 4 x 4 luminance blocks enhance the security. The hidden information can be extracted directly from the encoded stream without resorting to the original video, and merely requires decoding the intra-prediction mode from bit stream rather than decoding the whole video. Experimental results show that the proposed hiding scheme can effectively embed information with little bit rate increase and almost no quality degradation.