Genuine Reversible Data Hiding Technique for H.264 Bitstream Using Multi-Dimensional Histogram Shifting Technology on QDCT Coefficients

• Main Authors: Jinwoo Kang, Hyunjung Kim, Sang-ug Kang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-09-01
• Series: Applied Sciences
• Subjects: reversible data hiding; H.264/AVC; histogram shifting, QDCT; genuine RDH; multi-dimensional histogram shifting
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/10/18/6410

Video has become the most important medium for communication among people. Video has become the most important medium for communication among people. Therefore, reversible data hiding technologies for video have been developed so that information can be hidden in the video without damaging the original video in order to be used in the copyright protection and distribution field of video. This paper proposes a practical and genuine reversible data hiding method by using a multi-dimensional histogram shifting scheme on QDCT coefficients in the H.264/AVC bitstream. The proposed method defines the vacant histogram bins as a set of <i>n</i>-dimensional vectors and finds the optimal vector space, which gives the best performance, in a 4 × 4 QDCT block. In addition, the secret message is mapped to the optimal vector space, which is equivalent to embedding the information into the QDCT block. The simulation results show that the data hiding efficiency is the highest among the compared five existing methods. In addition, the image distortion and maximum payload capacity are measured quite high.