H.264/AVC compressed domain data hiding algorithm based on in-loop compensation

Error drift is a big problem during data hiding in H.264/AVC compressed videos, which will cause drastic drop in video quality. In order to decrease the distortion at low computation cost, this paper proposed a new data hiding algorithm by introducing an in-loop compensation scheme. It utilized the prediction information decoded from original compressed video to re-encode the video, and then embedded the concealed data into DC coefficients of intra_4×4 macro-blocks inside I-frames during the new encoding process. Simulation results show that, the proposed scheme can embed large data into H.264/AVC stream with imperceptible distortion and nearly no stream size amplification.