Information hiding in H.264, H.265, and MJPEG

Abstract

Steganography refers to the process of inserting information into a medium to secure the communication. Video steganography, which is the focus of this paper, can be viewed as an extension of image steganography. In fact, a video stream consists of a series of consecutive and equally time-spaced still images, sometimes accompanied with audio. There are many image steganographic techniques that are applicable to videos as well. In this paper, data hiding is done in H.264, H.265, and MJPEG using LSB- and PVD- based steganographic algorithms. A comparative study is also done for the above mentioned video codecs. Here, we address the issues of the least detectable steganographic algorithm when performing steganalysis in terms of MMD and the best channel and location for embedding the secret information. We also discuss the applications that work on these compression formats that can take advantage of this work.