A DCT/DST-based error propagation-free data hiding algorithm for HEVC intra-coded frames

• The first DCT/DST based data hiding algorithm for HEVC intra-coded frames.
• The proposed algorithm can eliminate the intra-frame error propagation due to embedding.
• The proposed algorithm can alleviate the inter-frame error propagation due to embedding.
• Empirical results demonstrate our algorithm is superior for the case of low bitrate video coding.

Currently, two error propagation-free discrete cosine transform (DCT)-based data hiding algorithms, one by Ma et al. and the other by Lin et al., were presented for H.264/AVC intra-coded frames. However, the state-of-the-art video codec, high efficiency video coding (HEVC), adopts both integer DCT and discrete sine transform (DST) such that the previous DCT-based algorithms cannot fully utilize available capacity for data hiding in HEVC. This paper presents the first DCT/DST-based data hiding algorithm for HEVC intra-coded frames where the block DCT and DST coefficient characteristics are investigated to locate the transformed coefficients that can be perturbed without propagating errors to neighboring blocks. Experimental results confirm the merits of the proposed algorithm in providing the intra-frame error propagation-free advantage, the quality improvement for marked images, the compression power inherited from HEVC, and the superiority of embedding capacity for low bitrate coding when compared with the previous two algorithms for H.264/AVC.