Data Hiding on H.264/AVC Compressed Video

An important issue in embedding watermark bits in compressed video stream is to keep the bit-rate unchanged after the watermarking. This is a very difficult problem for high efficient compression methods such as H.264/AVC, because just one bit alteration in highly compressed bit-stream may widely affect the video content. In this paper we solve this problem by embedding watermark bit to the sign bit of the Trailing Ones in Context Adaptive Variable Length Coding (CAVLC) of H.264/AVC. The algorithm yields no bit-rate change after the data hiding. Also, we can easily balance between the capacity of the watermark bits and the fidelity of the video. The simplicity of the proposed algorithm is an added bonus for the real-time applications. Our experiments show that the PSNRs of the video sequences after the data hiding are higher than 43dB.

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