Perceptually transparent attachment of content-based data to audio-visual documents

We present a new method for attaching data to digital audio-visual (AV) documents. Our method is steganographic, i.e., a secondary data stream is integrated or embedded into a given host data stream. Using a psychophysic model evaluated on the AV data, we perform embedding in a perceptually transparent way. In this way, the perceptual quality of the AV document is not altered. An important characteristic of our technique is the obtainable high embedding data capacity. Applications using this technique frequently embed content related information. As one of our examples, we describe a psychoacoustic audio codec for multiple generation compression