A compressed-domain visual information embedding algorithm for MPEG-2 HDTV streams

Many features of traditional TV service are becoming desirable for software multimedia applications to provide open solutions and improve flexibility. We have studied a new kind of service, what we call "visual information embedding", that comes from the idea of picture-in-picture. Based on previous work in MPEG-compressed domain algorithms, we propose a "backtracking" approach that reduces the decoding complexity up to 90% and enables real-time processing on MPEG2 streams at the price of a delay of one group-of-picture period. We have implemented a software real-time visual information embedding gateway for HDTV streams, and the experimental results have shown that our solution is practical and efficient.