A Data Hiding Algorithm for H.264/AVC Video Streams Without Intra-Frame Distortion Drift

Intra-frame distortion drift is a big problem of data hiding in H.264/AVC video streams. Based on a thorough investigation of this problem, a novel readable data-hiding algorithm, which can embed data into the quantized discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients of I frames without bringing any intra-frame distortion drift into the H.264/advanced video coding (AVC) video host, is presented in this paper. We exploit several paired-coefficients of a 4 × 4 DCT block to accumulate the embedding induced distortion. The directions of intra-frame prediction are utilized to avert the distortion drift. It is proved analytically and shown experimentally that the proposed algorithm can achieve high embedding capacity and low visual distortion. Performance comparisons with other existing schemes are provided to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed scheme.