A practical design of high-volume steganography in digital video files

Abstract

In this research, we consider exploiting the large volume of audio/video data streams in compressed video clips/files for effective steganography. By observing that most of the distributed video files employ H.264 Advanced Video Coding (AVC) and MPEG Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) for video/audio compression, we examine the coding features in these data streams to determine appropriate data for modification so that the reliable high-volume information hiding can be achieved. Such issues as the perceptual quality, compressed bit-stream length, payload of embedding, effectiveness of extraction and efficiency of execution will be taken into consideration. First, the effects of using different coding features are investigated separately and three embedding profiles, i.e. High, Medium and Low, which indicate the amount of payload, will then be presented. The High profile is used to embed the maximum amount of hidden information when the high payload is the only major concern in the target application. The Medium profile is recommended since it is designed to achieve a good balance among several requirements. The Low profile is an efficient implementation for faster information embedding. The performances of these three profiles are reported and the suggested Medium profile can hide more than 10% of the compressed video file size in common Flash Video (FLV) files.