High capacity and multilevel information hiding algorithm based on pu partition modes for HEVC videos

Abstract

In order to realize copyright protection and piracy tracking for ever-increasing videos, video information hiding has gained more and more attention. For the latest video coding standard — High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), most of the information hiding algorithms are based on the same characteristics as those in MPEG4 and H.264, such as DCT coefficients, intra prediction modules and motion vectors. However, few algorithms are reported to hide information based on the innovation modules introduced by HEVC. This paper has proposed a high capacity and multilevel information hiding algorithm based on PU partition modes in P-frames, which is considered to be one of the most important innovative features of HEVC. The proposed algorithm consists of two stages: first round calculation and modification process. The first round calculation is to record the PU partition modes selected by HEVC. The modification process is to force each of PU mode into one of the encoded groups according to the embedding binary bits, and then use the modified PU partition modes for the left HEVC encoding process. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve high capacity and visual quality, and low bit rate increase, which significantly outperforms state-of-the-art works in embedding capacity.