In the past two decades, reversible data hiding (RDH), also referred to as lossless or invertible data hiding, has gradually become a very active research area in the field of data hiding. This has been verified by more and more papers on increasingly wide-spread subjects in the field of RDH research that have been published these days. In this paper, the various RDH algorithms and researches have been classified into the following six categories: 1) RDH into image spatial domain; 2) RDH into image compressed domain (e.g., JPEG); 3) RDH suitable for image semi-fragile authentication; 4) RDH with image contrast enhancement; 5) RDH into encrypted images, which is expected to have wide application in the cloud computation; and 6) RDH into video and into audio. For each of these six categories, the history of technical developments, the current state of the arts, and the possible future researches are presented and discussed. It is expected that the RDH technology and its applications in the real word will continue to move ahead.

Reversible Data Hiding: Advances in the Past Two Decades

As the next generation standard of video coding, the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is intended to provide significantly better coding efficiency than all existing video coding standards. To improve the coding efficiency of intra frame coding, up to 34 intra prediction modes are defined in HEVC. The best mode among these pre-defined intra prediction modes is selected by rate-distortion optimization (RDO) for each block. If all directions are tested in the RDO process, it will be very time-consuming. To alleviate the encoder computation load, this paper proposes a new method to reduce the candidates in RDO process. In addition, the direction information of the neighboring blocks is made full use of to speed up intra mode decision. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme provides 20% and 28% time savings in intra high efficiency and low complexity cases on average compared to the default encoding scheme in HM 1.0 with almost the same coding efficiency. This algorithm has been proposed to HEVC standard and partially adopted into the HEVC test model.

Fast mode decision algorithm for intra prediction in HEVC

Reversible data hiding in encrypted images (RDHEI) is an effective technique to embed data in the encrypted domain. An original image is encrypted with a secret key and during or after its transmission, it is possible to embed additional information in the encrypted image, without knowing the encryp-tion key or the original content of the image. During the decoding process, the secret message can be extracted and the original image can be reconstructed. In the last few years, RDHEI has started to draw research interest. Indeed, with the development of cloud computing, data privacy has become a real issue. However, none of the existing methods allow us to hide a large amount of information in a reversible manner. In this paper, we propose a new reversible method based on MSB (most significant bit) prediction with a very high capacity. We present two approaches, these are: high capacity reversible data hiding approach with correction of prediction errors and high capacity reversible data hiding approach with embedded prediction errors. With this method, regardless of the approach used, our results are better than those obtained with current state of the art methods, both in terms of reconstructed image quality and embedding capacity.

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An Efficient MSB Prediction-Based Method for High-Capacity Reversible Data Hiding in Encrypted Images

In high efficiency video coding (HEVC), the tree structured coding unit (CU) is adopted to allow recursive splitting into four equally sized blocks. At each depth level (or CU size), it enables up to 35 intraprediction modes, including a planar mode, a dc mode, and 33 directional modes. The intraprediction via exhaustive mode search exploited in the test model of HEVC (HM) effectively improves coding efficiency, but results in a very high computational complexity. In this paper, a fast CU size decision algorithm for HEVC intracoding is proposed to speed up the process by reducing the number of candidate CU sizes required to be checked for each treeblock. The novelty of the proposed algorithm lies in the following two aspects: 1) an early determination of CU size decision with adaptive thresholds is developed based on the texture homogeneity and 2) a novel bypass strategy for intraprediction on large CU size is proposed based on the combination of texture property and coding information from neighboring coded CUs. Experimental results show that the proposed effective CU size decision algorithm achieves a computational complexity reduction up to 67%, while incurring only 0.06-dB loss on peak signal-to-noise ratio or 1.08% increase on bit rate compared with that of the original coding in HM.

Effective CU Size Decision for HEVC Intracoding

The illegal distribution of a digital movie is a common and significant threat to the film industry. With the advent of high-speed broadband Internet access, a pirated copy of a digital video can now be easily distributed to a global audience. A possible means of limiting this type of digital theft is digital video watermarking whereby additional information, called a watermark, is embedded in the host video. This watermark can be extracted at the decoder and used to determine whether the video content is watermarked. This paper presents a review of the digital video watermarking techniques in which their applications, challenges, and important properties are discussed, and categorizes them based on the domain in which they embed the watermark. It then provides an overview of a few emerging innovative solutions using watermarks. Protecting a 3D video by watermarking is an emerging area of research. The relevant 3D video watermarking techniques in the literature are classified based on the image-based representations of a 3D video in stereoscopic, depth-image-based rendering, and multi-view video watermarking. We discuss each technique, and then present a survey of the literature. Finally, we provide a summary of this paper and propose some future research directions.

An Overview of Digital Video Watermarking

Digital video sometimes needs to be stored and processed in an encrypted format to maintain security and privacy. For the purpose of content notation and/or tampering detection, it is necessary to perform data hiding in these encrypted videos. In this way, data hiding in encrypted domain without decryption preserves the confidentiality of the content. In addition, it is more efficient without decryption followed by data hiding and re-encryption. In this paper, a novel scheme of data hiding directly in the encrypted version of H.264/AVC video stream is proposed, which includes the following three parts, i.e., H.264/AVC video encryption, data embedding, and data extraction. By analyzing the property of H.264/AVC codec, the codewords of intraprediction modes, the codewords of motion vector differences, and the codewords of residual coefficients are encrypted with stream ciphers. Then, a data hider may embed additional data in the encrypted domain by using codeword substitution technique, without knowing the original video content. In order to adapt to different application scenarios, data extraction can be done either in the encrypted domain or in the decrypted domain. Furthermore, video file size is strictly preserved even after encryption and data embedding. Experimental results have demonstrated the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed scheme.

Data Hiding in Encrypted H.264/AVC Video Streams by Codeword Substitution

Separable and error-free reversible data hiding in encrypted images

To reduce the intra encoding complexity of HEVC, a fast intra prediction mode decision algorithm is proposed in this paper. According to different size of prediction unit, based on statistical data, the algorithm uses threshold method to exclude the intra prediction modes of small possibility, then reduce the number of intra prediction modes for the rate distortion cost (RD Cost) calculation and cut down the encoding complexity. Experimental results show that compared with the HEVC reference software HM12.0, the proposed algorithm can achieve a reduction of 24.27% in average in intra prediction coding time, with a negligible average PSNR loss and average bit rate increment.

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A Fast Mode Decision Algorithm for Intra Prediction in HEVC

As the H.264/AVC-based video products become more and more popular, issues of copyright protection and authentication that are appropriate for this standard will be very important. In this paper, a content-based authentication watermarking scheme for H.264/AVC video is proposed. Considering the new feature of H.264/AVC, the content-based authentication code for spatial tampering is firstly generated using the reliable features extracted from video frame blocks. The authentication code, which can detect malicious manipulations but allow recompression, is embedded into the DCT coefficients in diagonal positions using a novel modulation method. Spatial tampering can be located by comparing the extracted and the original feature-based watermarks. In addition, combining ECC and interleaving coding, the frame index of each video frame is used as watermark information and embedded in the residual coefficients. Temporal tampering can be detected by the mismatch between the extracted and the observed frame index. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme can discriminate the malicious tampering from the mild signal processing. The tampered location can also be approximately determined according to the glide window and the predefined threshold.

A novel watermarking scheme for H.264/AVC video authentication

In this paper, a data-hiding algorithm with large data payload for H.264/AVC is proposed. The secret information is embedded by modulating the prediction modes of 4 × 4 luminance blocks. If the best mode does not match the information bit, the prediction mode should be modulated by replacing the best mode with the substitute mode. The substitute mode is the one with the least Lagrangian cost among those having different parity with the best mode. Due to high secrecy and easy reproducibility of chaos, the secret information is first encrypted by a chaotic sequence and then a small number of luminance blocks used for data embedding are randomly selected in each macroblock based on another chaotic sequence. The usefulness of multilevel chaotic keys and privacy of the number of 4 × 4 luminance blocks enhance the security. The hidden information can be extracted directly from the encoded stream without resorting to the original video, and merely requires decoding the intra-prediction mode from bit stream rather than decoding the whole video. Experimental results show that the proposed hiding scheme can effectively embed information with little bit rate increase and almost no quality degradation.

Dawen Xu

Papers

Data Hiding in Encrypted H.264/AVC Video Streams by Codeword Substitution

Separable and error-free reversible data hiding in encrypted images

A Fast Mode Decision Algorithm for Intra Prediction in HEVC

A novel watermarking scheme for H.264/AVC video authentication

Prediction mode modulated data-hiding algorithm for H.264/AVC