Error Drift Compensation for Data Hiding of the H.264/AVC
Abstract
The error propagation problem is one of the most attractive issues in the field of data hiding of compressed video because the achievement of several data hiding characteristics remains dependant on it. In this paper, a solution to compensate the error propagation is proposed for data hiding of the H.264/AVC. The error compensation is performed by a prior measurement of the introduced error in the watermarked block or in the neighbouring blocks. Two schemes are proposed: The first algorithm exploits the method of watermarking paired-coefficients in each block in order to bring the error to the middle of the block matrix. The distortion caused by each paired-coefficient is calculated in order to give a watermarking priority to the pairs which introduce the minimum error. In the second scheme, the error estimated in the neighbouring blocks is reduced from the residuals during the encoding process. In both schemes, results show that an important improvement of the video quality can be achieved and a good compromise is provided between the video distortion, the bitrate and the embedding.
Keywords
H.264/AVC; data hiding; drift distortion; drift compensation; real-time applications