An error propagation free data hiding algorithm in HEVC intra-coded frames

Efficient data hiding algorithms have been developed for video coders such as MPEG-4 and H.264/AVC, to deliver embedded information. Lin et al. proposed an error propagation free discrete cosine transform (DCT) based data hiding algorithm in H.264/AVC intra-coded frames. However, the state-of-the-art video codec, high efficiency video coding (HEVC), adopts both DCT and discrete sine transform (DST) such that the previous DCT based data hiding algorithms cannot afford to fully utilize available capacity for data hiding under the HEVC framework. We proposed to investigate the block DCT and DST coefficient characteristics to specify the transformed coefficients that can be perturbed without propagating errors to neighboring blocks. Experiments on four different complexity test videos justified the efficiency of the proposed algorithm in performing intra-frame error propagation free data hiding, providing higher embedding capacity in low bitrate coding, and yielding better reconstructed video quality.