An information hiding algorithm based on intra-prediction modes for H.264 video stream

A new information hiding algorithm with prediction mode modulating for H.264 video is proposed.The secrect information is embedded by modifying intra-prediction modes of intra-4×4 blocks during the mode decision process.By utilizing an embedding/extracting matrix,three watermark bits are hidden while only one intra-4×4 block′s mode is changed.The detection of hidden information needs no original media,and merely requires to decode the intra-prediction modes of bit stream rather than to decode the whole video.Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach can effectively improve the capacity of hidden information with little bit rate increase and no quality degradation.