Video Coding Technique Research Articles

Linguistic response surface methodology approach to measure the quality of nonlinear frame‐pixel and bit place‐based video steganography

AbstractSteganography refers to the practice of hiding sensitive information inside seemingly unrelated data sets. Steganography in the video is one of the best methods available for hiding data without compromising the film's appearance. For improved security and compatibility, the traditional system uses different video steganography techniques with linear or precise positions. Traditional linear video steganography practices face vulnerability, a lack of security, limited embedding options, and inadequate compatibility. Here nonlinear frame(s) and pixel positions based information hiding techniques have been developed to overwhelm the following. Both the nonlinear frame positions and nonlinear pixel positions are selected for the video‐based steganography. In the beginning, the nonlinear frame positions are selected through the key and the key may be with any prescribed range and alphanumeric characters. A single or more frames may be selected through the key and that entirely depends upon the corresponding run‐through. Then the nonlinear pixel and bit positions are also selected through a similar key. The proposed method is also compared with some former techniques and gives a magnificent result. Furthermore, a security analysis of the suggested algorithm has also been conducted using the differential attack method. To validate the suggested method and ensure that it is accurate, the author of this article made use of a very specific and innovative methodology known as the linguistic response surface methodology (LRSM). This model is framed based on achieving a few steganography assessment measures like PSNR, SSIM, and MSE metric values after incorporating hidden text in various nonlinear frames' nonlinear pixel locations of the video. The analysis of the variance using LRSM for PSNR, SSIM, and MSE response reveals very substantial results with confirmation.

Facial Image Compression via Neural Image Manifold Compression

Although the recent learning-based image and video coding techniques achieve rapid development, the signal fidelity-driven target in these methods leads to the divergence to a highly effective and efficient coding framework for both human and machine. In this paper, we aim to address the issue by making use of the power of generative models to bridge the gap between full fidelity (for human vision) and high discrimination (for machine vision). Therefore, relying on existing pretrained generative adversarial networks (GAN), we build a GAN inversion framework that projects the image into a low-dimensional natural image manifold. In this manifold, the feature is highly discriminative and also encodes the appearance information of the image, named as <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">latent code</i> . Taking a variational bit-rate constraint with a hyperprior model to model/suppress the entropy of image manifold code, our method is capable of fulfilling the needs of both machine and human visions at very low bit-rates. To improve the visual quality of image reconstruction, we further propose <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">multiple latent codes</i> and <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">scalable inversion</i> . The former gets several latent codes in the inversion, while the latter additionally compresses and transmits a shallow compact feature to support visual reconstruction. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method in both human vision tasks, <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">i.e</i> . image reconstruction, and machine vision tasks, including semantic parsing and attribute prediction.

Review: Dual Method Cryptography and Steganography in Video Frames in IoT

The Internet of things (IoT) is one of those emerging technologies, which are going to rule the world in the next few decades. The IoT environment not only enables Human to Machine interaction but also fosters Machine to Machine connectivity. Numerous IoT devices have poor security and insufficient computing power, making them prime targets for hackers. The IoT environment uses lightweight cryptographic techniques to address security requirements. Another security method for IoT devices is steganography. In the contemporary Internet era, the ability to secure private information is crucial, and steganography offers this capability. Due to its great ability to conceal sensitive data, video has drawn the attention of numerous academics among all forms of digital media. The main goal of this work is to examine several methods for fusing video steganography and cryptography techniques. Additionally, a thorough investigation and evaluation of a variety of video steganography methods in both compressed and raw domains are also emphasized. The comprehensive analysis of prior material makes it easier to have in-depth knowledge while creating approaches that combine cryptography with steganography. Index Terms — IoT, Lightweight, Video, Cryptography, Stenography

Secret data sharing through coverless video steganography based on bit plane segmentation

Recently information hiding is acquiring significance with the rising multimedia content over the web. Coverless steganography has been perceived as quite possibly the most solid way to deal with moving classified information and has turned into a research problem area. Considering video as a transporter, coverless steganography is expanding prominently because of its greater number of features than other transporters like text and images. Usually, the existing scheme hides confidential information based on single-frame features in the video. A secret data sharing through coverless video steganography technique based on bit-plane segmentation has been proposed. After extracting frames from the video, each frame is split into multiple bit-planes using BPCS(Bit-plane complexity segmentation). The hash sequences are obtained from these bit-planes by calculating the mean values of corresponding bit-plane sub-blocks. A retrieval database is constructed, including the relation between obtained hash sequences and bit-plane features. To begin with, the sender altered the secret data into a piece stream and divided it into equivalent lengths. The related retrieval information matching the fragmented secret information is transmitted to the recipient over the insecure channel. The experimental results show that the proposed technique achieves better robustness to various attacks, larger capacity, less time cost for extracting hash sequences, and a higher concealing success rate than existing coverless video steganography techniques.

Complexity-Efficient Dependent Quantization for Versatile Video Coding

The dependent quantization (DQ) technique in Versatile Video Coding (VVC) provides high compression efficiency, but it suffers from much computation, which is not preferred in practical applications. In this context, we propose a complexity-efficient dependent quantization structure employing a machine learning-based DQ start position prediction and a simplified trellis structure. Firstly, the proposed DQ start position is decided by a binary classifier which finds an appropriate location to start the DQ process. To further reduce the processing time of the binary classification, we also set up a precondition with a learned preset threshold which can reduce the number of coefficients subjected to the classifier. Based on our statistical analysis showing that under certain conditions some branches of the trellis structure are not necessary to check, we also design a branch pruning method and a removal scheme of all-zero coefficient group checking to simplify the DQ trellis structure. Our proposed complexity-efficient DQ has much fewer calculations of rate-distortion costs. Our experimental results show that it can reduce the computational complexity of the DQ process with nearly no performance loss of Bjontegaard delta bit rate (BDBR) irrespective of the all intra or the random access configurations.

Video Steganography Technique Based on Enhanced Moving Objects Detection Method

Video steganography has become a popular option for protecting secret data from hacking attempts and common attacks on the internet. However, when the whole video frame(s) are used to embed secret data, this may lead to visual distortion.&#x0D; Materials and Methods:&#x0D; This work is an attempt to hide sensitive secret image inside the moving objects in a video based on separating the object from the background of the frame, selecting and arranging them according to object's size for embedding secret image. The proposed approach reverses the secret image bits and uses XOR technique between the reversed bits and the detected moving object bits for embedding. The proposed approach provides more security and imperceptibility as the moving objects are used for embedding, so it is difficult to notice the changes in the moving objects instead of using background area for embedding in the video. Further development to the proposed approach in the area of video steganography has been done by applying spatial model in combination with statistical model. Additional LSB styles have been also applied to evaluate the ability of the proposed approach in detecting moving objects. In addition to evaluating the robustness of the proposed approach against different attacks such as salt and pepper noise and median filtering.&#x0D; Results:&#x0D; The experimental results showed the better visual quality of the stego video with PSNR values exceeding 70 dB, this indicates that the proposed method works without causing much distortion in the original video and transmitted secret message.&#x0D; Conclusion:&#x0D; The experimental proof of the proposed approach can successfully detect and embed secret image. Also, it provides more security and imperceptibility as the data was hidden in the moving objects and the updates in the moving objects are difficult to notice rather than the static region in a video

Deep chroma prediction of Wyner–Ziv frames in distributed video coding of wireless capsule endoscopy video

Compression of captured video frames is crucial for saving the power in wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE). A low complexity encoder is desired to limit the power consumption required for compressing the WCE video. Distributed video coding (DVC) technique is best suitable for designing a low complexity encoder. In this technique, frames captured in RGB colour space are converted into YCbCr colour space. Both Y and CbCr representing luma and chroma components of the Wyner–Ziv (WZ) frames are processed and encoded in existing DVC techniques proposed for WCE video compression. In the WCE video, consecutive frames exhibit more similarity in texture and colour properties. The proposed work uses these properties to present a method for processing and encoding only the luma component of a WZ frame. The chroma components of the WZ frame are predicted by an encoder–decoder based deep chroma prediction model at the decoder by matching luma and texture information of the keyframe and WZ frame. The proposed method reduces the computations required for encoding and transmitting of WZ chroma component. The results show that the proposed DVC with a deep chroma prediction model performs better when compared to motion JPEG and existing DVC systems for WCE at the reduced encoder complexity.

A Review on Major Image and Video Steganography Techniques

With the growing expansion of the intensive sharing of multimedia content and secret communications, data concealing techniques have become increasingly crucial. Steganography is a mechanism for sharing data covertly and securely. It is the science of embedding hidden information into cover media by altering the cover image in a way that is difficult to detect by human eyes. Audio, video and image files can all benefit from steganography techniques. Video steganography is the process of hiding secret information in a video file. Video Steganography is concealing a secret message, which might be a secret text message or an image within a bigger one, in such a way that an unwelcome person cannot determine the presence of the concealed message just by looking at it. There are several Steganography strategies for hiding hidden information in videos, which are further detailed in this paper, along with some of the research efforts done in some disciplines under video steganography by some authors.This article discusses the advancements in the subject of image and video steganography, as well as a comparison of its many applications and methodologies. It is critical to secure digital information while communicating over the internet in today’s digitally-driven society. One of the techniques utilised for this is steganography. The importance of steganography and the numerous types of steganography are discussed in this study. It also clarified the vocabulary for the general model of digital steganography. The traditional steganography approach of most minor significant bit substitution is explored. Furthermore, in terms of several performance metrics, a comparison is made between the conventional technique and other techniques for covering media quality and imperceptibility. The size of the hidden message that can be embedded in the image is estimated.

A chaotic video steganography technique for carrying different types of secret messages

Increasing the security of data in insecure communication networks is the motivation of researchers to propose different types of methods. Steganography is one of the security techniques that is used in videos, images, sounds, and other digital data. This technique embeds important data or secret messages into cover media to prevent unauthorized access. This paper proposes a new method for video steganography to develop our security purposes. The proposed method uses integer wavelet transform to increase the security and quality of video frames. This paper also presents an improved three-dimensional Sine chaotic map and uses it in the processes of the proposed video steganography. Hiding different types of messages with various sizes is the main aim of the suggested algorithm. The simulation results show that the proposed method has good imperceptibility and performance after the embedding process. Furthermore, the results of extracted messages after applying some noises on the stego videos, and the regular/singular (RS) steganalysis results demonstrate the acceptable robustness against some noises. Also, comparison results show that the proposed method outperforms some similar approaches.

An ROI-based robust video steganography technique using SVD in wavelet domain

Abstract Steganography is a technique that embeds secret information in a suitable cover file such as text, image, audio, and video in such a manner that secret information remains invisible to the outside world. The study of the literature relevant to video steganography reveals that a tradeoff exists in attaining the acceptable values of various evaluation parameters such as a higher capacity usually results in lesser robustness or imperceptibility. In this article, we propose a technique that achieves high capacity along with required robustness. The embedding capacity is increased using singular value decomposition compression. To achieve the desired robustness, we constrain the embedding of the secret message in the region of interest in the cover video file. In this manner, we also succeed in maintaining the required imperceptibility. We prefer Haar-based lifting scheme in the wavelet domain for embedding the information because of its intrinsic benefits. We have implemented our suggested technique using MATLAB. The analysis of results on the prespecified parameters of the steganography justifies the effectiveness of the proposed technique.

Image and Video Coding Techniques for Ultra-low Latency

The next generation of wireless networks fosters the adoption of latency-critical applications such as XR, connected industry, or autonomous driving. This survey gathers implementation aspects of different image and video coding schemes and discusses their tradeoffs. Standardized video coding technologies such as HEVC or VVC provide a high compression ratio, but their enormous complexity sets the scene for alternative approaches like still image, mezzanine, or texture compression in scenarios with tight resource or latency constraints. Regardless of the coding scheme, we found inter-device memory transfers and the lack of sub-frame coding as limitations of current full-system and software-programmable implementations.

LSB-based pre-embedding video steganography with rotating & shifting poly-pattern block matrix.

BackgroundIn terms of data-hiding areas, video steganography is more advantageous compared to other steganography techniques since it uses video as its cover medium. For any video steganography, the good trade-off among robustness, imperceptibility, and payload must be created and maintained. Even though it has the advantage of capacity, video steganography has the robustness problem especially regarding spatial domain is used to implement it. Transformation operations and statistical attacks can harm secret data. Thus, the ideal video steganography technique must provide high imperceptibility, high payload, and resistance towards visual, statistical and transformation-based steganalysis attacks.MethodsOne of the most common spatial methods for hiding data within the cover medium is the Least Significant Bit (LSB) method. In this study, an LSB-based video steganography application that uses a poly-pattern key block matrix (KBM) as the key was proposed. The key is a 64 × 64 pixel block matrix that consists of 16 sub-pattern blocks with a pixel size of 16 × 16. To increase the security of the proposed approach, sub-patterns in the KBM are allowed to shift in four directions and rotate up to 270° depending on the user preference and logical operations. For additional security XOR and AND logical operations were used to determine whether to choose the next predetermined 64 × 64 pixel block or jump to another pixel block in the cover video frame to place a KBM to embed the secret data. The fact that the combination of variable KBM structure and logical operator for the secret data embedding distinguishes the proposed algorithm from previous video steganography studies conducted with LSB-based approaches.ResultsMean Squared Error (MSE), Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) and Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) parameters were calculated for the detection of the imperceptibility (or the resistance against visual attacks ) of the proposed algorithm. The proposed algorithm obtained the best MSE, SSIM and PSNR parameter values based on the secret message length as 0.00066, 0.99999, 80.01458 dB for 42.8 Kb of secret message and 0.00173, 0.99999, 75.72723 dB for 109 Kb of secret message, respectively. These results are better than the results of classic LSB and the studies conducted with LSB-based video steganography approaches in the literature. Since the proposed system allows an equal amount of data embedding in each video frame the data loss will be less in transformation operations. The lost data can be easily obtained from the entire text with natural language processing. The variable structure of the KBM, logical operators and extra security preventions makes the proposed system be more secure and complex. This increases the unpredictability and resistance against statistical attacks. Thus, the proposed method provides high imperceptibility and resistance towards visual, statistical and transformation-based attacks while acceptable even high payload.

A Robust Watermarking Technique for High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) Based on Blind Extraction Scheme

A Robust Watermarking Technique for High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) Based on Blind Extraction Scheme

A survey on information hiding using video steganography

In the last few decades, information security has gained huge importance owing to the massive growth in digital communication; hence, driving steganography to the forefront for secure communication. Steganography is a practice of concealing information or message in covert communication which involves hiding the information in any multimedia file such as text, image, or video. Many contributions have been made in the domain of image steganography; however, due to the low embedding capacity and robustness of images; videos are gaining more attention of academic researchers. This paper aims to provide a qualitative as well as quantitative analysis of various video steganography techniques by highlighting their properties, challenges, pros, and cons. Moreover, different quality metrics for the evaluation of distinct steganography techniques have also been discussed. The paper also provides an overview of steganalysis attacks which are commonly employed to test the security of the steganography techniques. The experimental analysis of some of the prominent techniques using different quality metrics has also been done. This paper also presented a critical analysis driven from the literature and the experimental results. The primary objective of this paper is to help the beginners to understand the basic concepts of this research domain to initiate their research in this field. Further, the paper highlighted the real-life applications of video steganography and also suggested some future directions which require the attention of the research community.

A Proposal to Improve the Bit Plane Steganography based on the Complexity Calculation Technique

The video steganography technique is being studied and applied a lot today because of its benefits. In particular, the video steganography technique using Bit-Plane Complexity Segmentation (BPCS) has increasingly proven its effectiveness compared to other methods. In this paper, based on the theoretical basis of the BPCS method, we propose a new method to improve the efficiency of the steganography process. Accordingly, our improvement proposal in this paper is improving the complexity formula of the bit planes. Our new formula not only has improved the steganographic thresholds in the bit planes to find more planes hiding secret information, but also has ensured the amount of information hidden in the video and their safety. The experimental results in the paper have not only demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed method but also provided a new mechanism for digital image analysis in general and video steganography techniques in particular.

Towards Coding for Human and Machine Vision: Scalable Face Image Coding

The past decades have witnessed the rapid development of image and video coding techniques in the era of big data. However, the signal fidelity-driven coding pipeline design limits the capability of the existing image/video coding frameworks to fulfill the needs of both machine and human vision. In this paper, we come up with a novel face image coding framework by leveraging both the compressive and the generative models, to support machine vision and human perception tasks jointly. Given an input image, the feature analysis is first applied, and then the generative model is employed to reconstruct image with compact structure and color features, where sparse edges are extracted to connect both kinds of vision and a key reference pixel selection method is proposed to determine the priorities of the reference color pixels for scalable coding. The compact edge map serves as the basic layer for machine vision tasks, and the reference pixels act as an enhanced layer to guarantee signal fidelity for human vision. By introducing advanced generative models, we train a decoding network to reconstruct images from compact structure and color representations, which is flexible to accept inputs in a scalable way and to control the imagery effect of the outputs between signal fidelity and visual realism. Experimental results and comprehensive performance analysis over the face image dataset demonstrate the superiority of our framework in both human vision tasks and machine vision tasks, which provide useful evidence on the emerging standardization efforts on MPEG VCM (Video Coding for Machine).

Quantization Parameter Cascading for Surveillance Video Coding Considering All Inter Reference Frames.

Video surveillance and its applications have become increasingly ubiquitous in modern daily life. In video surveillance system, video coding as a critical enabling technology determines the effective transmission and storage of surveillance videos. In order to meet the real-time or time-critical transmission requirements of video surveillance systems, the low-delay (LD) configuration of the advanced high efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard is usually used to encode surveillance videos. The coding efficiency of the LD configuration is closely related to the quantization parameter (QP) cascading technique which selects or determines the QPs for encoding. However, the quantization parameter cascading (QPC) technique currently adopted for the LD configuration in HEVC test model (i.e., HM) is not optimized since it has not taken full account of the reference dependency in coding. In this paper, an efficient QPC technique for surveillance video coding, referred to as QPC-SV, is proposed, considering all inter reference frames under the LD configuration. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed QPC-SV. Compared with the default configuration of QPC in the HM, the QPC-SV achieves significant rate-distortion performance gain with average BD-rates of -9.35% and -9.76% for the LDP and LDB configurations, respectively.

QoE‐Oriented Cooperative Broadcast Optimization for Vehicular Video Streaming

The popularity of online vehicular video has caused enormous information requests in Internet of vehicles (IoV), which brings huge challenges to cellular networks. To alleviate the pressure of base station (BS), Roadside Units (RSUs) and vehicle peers are introduced to collaboratively provide broadcast services to vehicle requesters where vehicles act as both service providers and service requesters. In this paper, we propose an efficient framework leveraging scalable video coding (SVC) technique to improve quality of experience (QoE) from two perspectives: (1) maximizing the data volume received by all requesters and (2) determining buffer action based on playback fluency and average playback quality. For (1), potential providers cooperate to determine the precached video content and delivery policy with the consideration of vehicular mobility and wireless channel status. If one provider fails, other sources will complement to provide requested content delivery. Therefore, their cooperation can improve the QoE and enhance the service reliability. For (2), according to buffer occupancy status, vehicle requesters manage buffer action whether to buffer new segments or upgrade the enhancement level of unplayed segment. Furthermore, the optimization of the data volume is formulated as an integer nonlinear programming (INLP) problem, which can be converted into some linear integer programming subproblems through McCormick envelope method and Lagrange relaxation. Numerical simulation results show that our algorithm is effective in improving total data throughput and QoE.

Deep Network-Based Frame Extrapolation With Reference Frame Alignment

Frame extrapolation is to predict future frames from the past (reference) frames, which has been studied intensively in the computer vision research and has great potential in video coding. Recently, a number of studies have been devoted to the use of deep networks for frame extrapolation, which achieves certain success. However, due to the complex and diverse motion patterns in natural video, it is still difficult to extrapolate frames with high fidelity directly from reference frames. To address this problem, we introduce reference frame alignment as a key technique for deep network-based frame extrapolation. We propose to align the reference frames, e.g. using block-based motion estimation and motion compensation, and then to extrapolate from the aligned frames by a trained deep network. Since the alignment, a preprocessing step, effectively reduces the diversity of network input, we observe that the network is easier to train and the extrapolated frames are of higher quality. We verify the proposed technique in video coding, using the extrapolated frame for inter prediction in High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) and Versatile Video Coding (VVC). We investigate different schemes, including whether to align between the target frame and the reference frames, and whether to perform motion estimation on the extrapolated frame. We conduct a comprehensive set of experiments to study the efficiency of the proposed method and to compare different schemes. Experimental results show that our proposal achieves on average 5.3% and 2.8% BD-rate reduction in Y component compared to HEVC, under low-delay P and low-delay B configurations, respectively. Our proposal performs much better than the frame extrapolation without reference frame alignment.

An Overview of the MPEG-5 Essential Video Coding Standard [Standards in a Nutshell

Since the 1970s, various image and video coding techniques have been explored, and some of them have been included in the video coding standards issued by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)/International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) Motion Pictures Expert Group (MPEG) and International Telecommunication Union-Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG). MPEG is the most successful standards development organization (SDO) for multimedia compression standardization. In particular, most of the widely deployed video coding standards of the past 30 years have been developed within this working group. One of the first, standardized in 1996, was the MPEG-2 standard [1], which is still in use as a digital TV standard in many countries.