Data Hiding for H.264/AVC Based on the Motion Vector of 16 Grids

Due to the development of digital techniques and the Internet, lots of digital multimedia are created, stored, and spread over the Internet. Because digital video can be modified easily and copied illegally, we need to pay attention to the issues of data security and copyright protection during transmission. Digital watermark, which embeds meaningful marks or words into the digital video, is a kind of methods used as the video copyright protection or the secret communication. In this paper, we propose a data hiding technique specific to the H.264/AVC video format based on the motion vectors. We achieve the purpose of data hiding by modifying motion vectors to their neighboring points within 16 grids. Experimental results show that our method can maintain a good video quality after the secret data are embedded. Moreover, our method has a large embedding capability and the embedded data can be easily extracted.