Minimizing Embedding Impact for H.264 Steganography by Progressive Trellis Coding

This paper proposes a novel coding strategy to achieve distortion minimization for H.264 steganography with quantized discrete cosine transform (QDCT) coefficients. Currently, with the help of syndrome-trellis codes (STCs), state-of-the-art image steganography embeds messages while minimizing a heuristically defined distortion function. However, this concept cannot be directly ported to steganography using compressed video as the cover media. According to the intra prediction principle, an H.264 QDCT coefficient block is predicted and coded based on previously encoded blocks, so even a slight embedding change will set off a chain reaction in the remaining cover blocks. Considering the cover block dependency, we make necessary changes to the standard trellis coding structure so as to be applicable for the joint compression embedding scenario. During the coding/embedding procedure, we maintain multiple contexts corresponding to possible optimal routes, and retrace each route periodically to determine how each cover block should be modified. After each modification, the remaining cover blocks, as well as their embedding costs, are re-evaluated, and each context is updated to reflect the embedding effect. In this way, the global optimality can be approached progressively in a block-by-block manner, so our proposed method is named progressive trellis coding (PTC). Extensive experiments have been conducted, and corresponding results show that the adoption of PTC brings about a significant gain in embedding performance.