Adaptive video data hiding with low bit-rate growth based on texture selection and ternary syndrome-trellis coding

Data hiding aims to embed a secret payload into a cover object without introducing significant degradation of the cover. The resulting object containing hidden information, typically also called stego, will not arouse obvious suspicion from the monitor. A number of data hiding systems have been designed for digital images and only a few focus on video sequences. Actually, video is quite desirable for data hiding due to its large capacity for carrying a payload. It motivates us to present an adaptive data hiding scheme to video sequences in this paper. In the proposed scheme, the non-zero quantized Discrete Cosine Transform (QDCT) coefficients of intra-frames are used to embed the secret payload based on ternary syndrome-trellis coding (STC) equipped with a well-designed distortion function. In order to realize data hiding with low bit-rate growth, the non-zero QDCT coefficients in complex texture regions with high amplitude are further exploited for data embedding. Experimental results have shown that, comparing with a part of related works, the proposed work provides high embedding capacity and lower bit-rate growth. And, the video quality after data hiding can be kept with a high level. In addition, the proposed work does not expose suspicious histogram distribution and block characteristics, which has shown the superiority and applicability of the proposed work.