Steganography algorithm based on modified EMD-coded PU partition modes for HEVC videos

Zhenzhen Zhang,Jindou Liu,Zhaohong Li,Lifang Yu,Huanma Yan

doi:10.1186/s13640-021-00547-5

Abstract

As High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is a worldwide popular video coding standard, the steganography of HEVC videos has gained more and more attention. Prediction unit (PU) is one of the most important innovative modules of HEVC; thus, PU partition mode-based steganography is becoming a novel branch of HEVC steganography. However, the embedding capacity of this kind of steganography is limited by the types of PU partition modes. To solve the problem, modified exploiting modification direction (EMD)-coded PU partition mode-based steganography is proposed in this paper, which can hide a secret digit in a (2n + x − 1)-ary notational system in a pair of PU partition modes and thus enlarging the capacity. Furthermore, two mapping patterns for PU partition modes are analyzed, and the one that performs the better is selected as the final mapping pattern. Firstly, 8 × 8- and 16 × 16-sized PU partition modes are recorded according to the optimal mapping pattern in the video encoding process. Then, PU partition modes are modified by using the proposed method to satisfy the requirement of secret information. Finally, the stego video can be obtained by re-encoding the video with the modified PU partition modes. Experimental results show that the embedding capacity can be significantly enlarged, and compared with the state-of-the-art work, the proposed method has much larger capacity while keeping high visual quality.

Highlights

Steganography is a hot research issue in the field of information security
coding unit (CU) with different sizes own different Prediction unit (PU) partition modes, which have an impact on embedding capacity; we investigate the variety of PU partition modes for different sized CUs and select CUs with sizes of 16 × 16 and 8 × 8 to hide information
An image is firstly divided into non-overlapping coding tree unit (CTU) whose size is set by the user with 64 × 64 as default

Summary

Introduction

Steganography is a hot research issue in the field of information security. It can imperceptibly conceal secret information in the carrier such as texts, images, and videos and has extensive applications in copyright protection, identity authentication, covert communication, and so on. By modifying the characteristic value function and designing a new codebook, a high-performance HEVC video steganography is proposed in this paper.

Results

Conclusion