An adaptive steganographic scheme for H.264/AVC video with distortion optimization

Abstract

With the popularity of streaming media, data hiding in H.264/AVC video streams has attracted more and more attention. However, how to achieve high secure video steganography while preventing intra-frame distortion drift is a challenging task. In this paper, based on Syndrome–Trellis Code(STC), we propose a secure steganographic scheme using Quantized Discrete Cosine Transform (QDCT) coefficients of I-frames. We first present a theoretical analysis of the block distortion, which consists of inter-block distortion caused by data embedding in reference pixels of adjacent blocks and inner-block distortion caused by data embedding in local pixels of current block. Based on block distortion analysis, we propose a novel distortion optimization strategy by avoiding inter-block distortion and decreasing inner-block distortion. The cost function is constructed based on block distortion, bit-rate change and texture complexity of DCT block. Compared with distortion compensation methods, the proposed method not only considers the distortion optimization but also introduces secure steganographic scheme. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme can resist the state-of-the-art steganalytic method while achieving high visual quality.