Open Access

ARTICLE

Reversible Data Hiding Based on Run-Level Coding in H.264/AVC Video Streams

by Yi Chen, Hongxia Wang, Xuyun Zhang

1 School of Information Science and Technology, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, 611756, China.
2 College of Cybersecurity, Sichuan University, Chengdu, 610064, China.
3 Department of Electrical, Computer and Software Engineering, University of Auckland, Auckland, 1023, New Zealand.

* Corresponding Author: Hongxia Wang. Email: .

Computers, Materials & Continua 2020, 63(2), 911-922. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2020.08027

Received 22 July 2019; Accepted 15 September 2019; Issue published 01 May 2020

Abstract

This paper presents a reversible data hiding (RDH) method, which is designed by combining histogram modification (HM) with run-level coding in H.264/advanced video coding (AVC). In this scheme, the run-level is changed for embedding data into H.264/AVC video sequences. In order to guarantee the reversibility of the proposed scheme, the last nonzero quantized discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients in embeddable 4×4 blocks are shifted by the technology of histogram modification. The proposed scheme is realized after quantization and before entropy coding of H.264/AVC compression standard. Therefore, the embedded information can be correctly extracted at the decoding side. Peak-signal-noise-to-ratio (PSNR) and Structure similarity index (SSIM), embedding payload and bit-rate variation are exploited to measure the performance of the proposed scheme. Experimental results have shown that the proposed scheme leads to less SSIM variation and bit-rate increase.

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Keywords

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