Adaptive MPEG-2 video data hiding scheme

We have investigated adaptive mechanisms for high-volume transform-domain data hiding in video which can be tuned to sustain varying levels of compression attacks. The data is hidden in the uncornpressed domain by scalar quantization index modulation (QIM) on a selected set of low-frequency discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients. We propose an adaptive hiding scheme where the embedding rate is varied according to the type of frame and the reference quantization parameter (decided according to MPEG-2 rate control scheme) for that frame. For a 1.5 Mbps video and a frame-rate of 25 frames/sec, we are able to embed almost 7500 bits/see. Also, the adaptive scheme hides 20% more data and incurs significantly less frame errors (frames for which the embedded data is not fully recovered) than the non-adaptive scheme. Our embedding scheme incurs insertions kind deletions at the decoder which may cause de-synchronization and decoding failure. This problem is solved by the use of powerful turbo-like codes and erasures at the encoder. The channel capacity estimate gives an idea of the minimum code redundancy factor required for reliable decoding of hidden data transmitted through the channel. To that end. we have modeled the MPEG-2 video channel using the transition probability matrices given by the data hiding procedure, using which we compute the (hiding scheme dependent) channel capacity.