A DCT/DST-based error propagation-free data hiding algorithm for HEVC intra-coded frames

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Highlights

  • The first DCT/DST based data hiding algorithm for HEVC intra-coded frames.

  • The proposed algorithm can eliminate the intra-frame error propagation due to embedding.

  • The proposed algorithm can alleviate the inter-frame error propagation due to embedding.

  • Empirical results demonstrate our algorithm is superior for the case of low bitrate video coding.

Abstract

Currently, two error propagation-free discrete cosine transform (DCT)-based data hiding algorithms, one by Ma et al. and the other by Lin et al., were presented for H.264/AVC intra-coded frames. However, the state-of-the-art video codec, high efficiency video coding (HEVC), adopts both integer DCT and discrete sine transform (DST) such that the previous DCT-based algorithms cannot fully utilize available capacity for data hiding in HEVC. This paper presents the first DCT/DST-based data hiding algorithm for HEVC intra-coded frames where the block DCT and DST coefficient characteristics are investigated to locate the transformed coefficients that can be perturbed without propagating errors to neighboring blocks. Experimental results confirm the merits of the proposed algorithm in providing the intra-frame error propagation-free advantage, the quality improvement for marked images, the compression power inherited from HEVC, and the superiority of embedding capacity for low bitrate coding when compared with the previous two algorithms for H.264/AVC.

Introduction

With the advance of digital multimedia communication techniques, data hiding becomes important in the authentication, identification, annotation, and copyright protection of digital media items [18], [3], [10], [15], among which digital video is most widely used. However, due to the massive information amount of digital video signals, it needs highly efficient video coding to make video communication feasible. Recently, several transform domain based data hiding algorithms [16], [21], [14], [22], [5], [8], [6], [17] have been developed in H.264/AVC [4], where the quantized discrete cosine transform coefficients (QDCTs) of the 4×4 luma blocks in intra-coded frames (IFs) are perturbed so as to carry the hidden data. Unfortunately, these algorithms have the intra-frame error propagation problem due to the improper perturbation strategies for the QDCTs, leading to severe quality degradation for the reconstructed video signals.

To solve this problem, Ma et al. [11] proposed an effective perturbation strategy for the QDCTs of the 4×4 luma blocks based on both the directions of intra prediction modes and the deviation in the pixel values resulted from changing the QDCTs values. Lin et al. [9] proposed to increase the embedding capacity for the 4×4 luma blocks achieved by Ma et al. and to additionally utilize the other 4×4 luma blocks for embedding one bit into each of them. Although the intra-frame error propagation has been tackled in the algorithms [11], [9], the inter-frame error propagation is another challenging problem for these transform domain based data hiding algorithms [13], [23].

As the application demands higher video signal resolution, the H.264/AVC standard can no longer achieve satisfied compression performance. A state-of-the-art video coding standard, high efficiency video coding (HEVC) [2], [19], is developed to improve the compression efficiency for high resolution video signals. When considering data hiding in HEVC video sequences, one intuitive way is to adapt the previous data hiding algorithms used for H.264/AVC to the HEVC standard. However, since the HEVC 4×4 block does not utilize integer DCT for transform coding, the transform domain data hiding algorithms developed based on 4×4 DCT blocks of H.264/AVC cannot be applied to HEVC. Hence, developing a data hiding algorithm that can support the transform coding adopted by HEVC while eliminating the intra-frame error propagation and alleviating the inter-frame error propagation is required, which motivates this research.

In this paper, we propose an error propagation-free data hiding algorithm for HEVC IFs. The main idea of the proposed algorithm is to categorize blocks so as to impose specific quantized coefficient perturbation patterns for intra-frame error propagation-free data hiding under the HEVC framework. For HEVC IFs, we propose a DCT and discrete sine transform (DST)-based coefficient perturbation scheme for embedding hidden bits. The error propagation patterns corresponding to different HEVC intra prediction modes are first classified for imposing different data hiding patterns. These data hiding patterns, which correspond to specific QDCT and QDST coefficient perturbations, are used to embed hidden bits into HEVC IFs without inducing intra-frame error propagation. In addition, one quality improvement scheme is proposed for the reconstructed IFs and meanwhile alleviates the quality degradation due to inter-frame error propagation. Experimental results on ten test videos confirm the merits of the proposed algorithm in providing the intra-frame error propagation-free advantage, the quality improvement for marked images, the compression power inherited from HEVC and the superiority of embedding capacity for low bitrate coding, although the embedding capacity is less than that of the previous two algorithms for H.264/AVC IFs for middle and high bitrate coding. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that such a DCT/DST-based data hiding algorithm is presented for HEVC.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, the HEVC intra coding scheme and related block transform coding operations are reviewed. The proposed DCT/DST-based data hiding algorithm in HEVC and its theoretical analysis are presented in Section 3. Section 4 demonstrates experimental results and performance evaluation. Some concluding remarks are addressed in Section 5.

Section snippets

Intra coding scheme and the related transform coding in HEVC

The HEVC intra coding scheme, including block transform coding operations, will be first reviewed, with which the proposed data hiding algorithm can be clearly described.

Intra-frame error propagation patterns in HEVC

Since the HEVC intra prediction utilizes spatial correlation among image pixels for compression, the current N×N PU may refer to the neighboring pixels {s0,j}j=0,1,,2N and {si,0}i=1,,2N collected from upper-right, upper, upper-left, left and lower-left blocks, as shown in Fig. 3(a), to perform intra prediction. In other words, errors on the pixels {Ri,N}i=1,,N and {RN,j}j=1,,N-1 of the current N×N PU, as shown in Fig. 4, may be propagated, via intra prediction, to neighboring upper-right,

Experimental results

Since the proposed algorithm is the first DCT/DST-based error propagation-free data hiding algorithm designed specifically for HEVC IFs, two previous DCT-based error propagation-free data hiding algorithms based on H.264/AVC IFs, the algorithms of Ma et al. [11] and Lin et al. [9], are performed for comparison. Performance comparisons among the proposed data hiding algorithm and the two previous ones are made in terms of embedding capacity, PSNR, and bitrate. The standard H.264/AVC and HEVC

Conclusions

To embed hidden bits in HEVC IFs without propagating errors to neighboring blocks and adjacent frames, we proposed to classify HEVC coding blocks, according to certain intra prediction mode combinations of neighboring blocks, to perform specific data hiding patterns. The signal characteristics of DCT/DST are analyzed to locate the QDCTs/QDSTs that can be perturbed without propagating errors to neighboring intra-coded blocks. In additional to the intra-frame error propagation-free data hiding

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      Citation Excerpt :

      Generally, the existing HEVC video steganography algorithms can be classified into three categories, which modify the cover elements in transform domain, intra prediction domain and inter prediction domain respectively. In transform domain, Chang et al. [5,6] first embedded secret information by modifying the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficients and Discrete Sine Transform (DST) coefficients. To avoid intra-frame distortion drift, these works divided the PU into five categories and introduced different perturbation patterns for each category of luminance blocks.

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    The work of K.L. Chung and C.H. Lin was supported by the National Science Council of ROC under the contracts NSC99-2221-E-011-078-MY3, NSC101-2221-E-011-139-MY3, and NSC102-2221-E-011-055-MY3. The work of J.J. Chen was supported by the National Science Council of ROC under the contract NSC101-2221-E-011-137.

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