An Anti-Steganalysis HEVC Video Steganography With High Performance Based on CNN and PU Partition Modes

Abstract

The steganography research of videos leads to excellent communication methods for transmitting secret message, and high efficiency video coding(HEVC) video is one popular steganographic carrier. This article proposes a prediction unit(PU) based wide residual-net steganography(PWRN) for HEVC videos. The visual quality distortion of modifying PUs is theoretically analyzed, which illustrates that modifying PUs only has a little negative effect on visual quality. Therefore, the data hiding method in this article allows to modify all types of PUs except for <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$2N\times 2N$</tex-math></inline-formula> to each other according to the secret data. In this way, high embedding efficiency is achieved, and the PU distributions in stego-videos can be kept similar to those of cover-videos, which is essential for resisting steganalysis. Meanwhile, a super-resolution convolutional neural network(CNN) with wide residual-net filter(WRNF) is proposed to replace the in-loop filter in HEVC for reconstructing I-pictures, which results in more precisely predicted P-pictures, and it further leads to less bitrate cost and better visual quality of stego-videos. The experimental results show that the proposed PWRN successfully resists the latest PU-targeted steganalysis algorithms, and compared with the state-of-the-art work, PWRN has achieved the lowest bitrate cost and the highest visual quality under the same capacity.