A DCT based near reversible data embedding scheme for MPEG-4 video

Abstract

The new category near reversible data embedding is emerging in the area of digital watermarking and steganography for providing security to the multimedia contents. Probably, the increased interest on this category of schemes is due to the limitations like more modifications, low embedding capacity of reversible schemes, apart from the applications of near reversible schemes. In this paper we propose a simple near reversible data embedding scheme which embeds the data during the process of MPEG-4 compression of digital video. We use the non-zero AC elements of quantized DCT coefficients in the middle frequency region of DCT blocks. We also give the formal definitions of the reversibility classifying the data embedding schemes. The experimental results not only shows the good performance in terms of capacity, visual quality, robustness but also the percentage of reversibility of host data is around 99.92 % for most of the test video sequences. © 2013 Springer.