The use of steganography to enhance error detection and correction in MPEG-2 video

The transmission of data is always subject to corruption due to errors; however, video transmission, because of its real time nature, must often deal with these errors without retransmission of the corrupted data. Our MPEG-2 compliant codec uses data hiding principles to transmit parity checking information for the DCT coefficients and uses side information (as provided in the MPEG-2 standard) to enhance the recovery of lost differentially encoded values. This information allows for improved resynchronization by correctly resynchronizing at least 7 times as often, reducing the number of macroblocks in error by a factor of 2 and improving the PSNR of error regions by at least 8 dB (in I frames) while uncorrupted picture quality decreases by less than 0.5 dB PSNR. Our work also demonstrates the ability to recover lost differential motion vectors by transmitting final values.