DCT based reversible data embedding for MPEG-4 video using HVS characteristics

Abstract

Recently, many data embedding schemes using the quantized DCT coefficients have been proposed for achieving the robustness. However, most of the schemes lack to strike a trade off between the embedding capacity and the visual quality. Achieving more embedding capacity by maintaining the visual quality has become a challenging task. Most of the DCT based data embedding schemes result in various visual distortions for not considering the HVS characteristics while embedding. The widely used visual quality measure PSNR is not sufficient to assess the quality of the distorted image/video content. However, the HVS based visual quality metrics PSNR-HVS and PSNR-HVS-M are very much suitable when the data is embedded in the frequency domain using DCT. We propose two reversible data embedding schemes which embed the data during the process of MPEG-4 compression of video. The first scheme achieves good visual quality in terms of HVS based metrics which can be useful for high fidelity watermarking applications and the second scheme achieves higher embedding capacity by maintaining better visual quality which can be useful for the steganographic applications.