A Data Hiding Scheme with High Quality for H.264/AVC Video Streams

Visual quality and bit-rate increase are two main metrics of evaluation for many researchers to evaluate the marked videos that additional data is embedded into. In this paper, we combine matrix embedding with several assumptions to propose a novel data hiding method in H.264/AVC video stream. The assumptions can be exploited to analyse the propagation of intra-frame distortion. Namely, both matrix embedding and the given assumptions are used for improving the quality of marked videos. Therefore, although the proposed scheme cannot completely avoid the intra-frame distortion drift, it can keep a few degradations in terms of visual quality and keep a small variation in bit-rate increase. Experimental results have verified that the proposed method has no significant degradation in terms of visual quality (i.e., PSNR and SSIM) and indeed obtains a very small variation in bit-rate increase.