Multilevel Data Hiding for Image and Video

Abstract

Content providers such as the movie industry and news agencies have imposed strong demand on ownership protection, alteration detection, access control, and source tracking (fingerprinting) of digital image and video. For these applications, it is desirable to embed many bits in high quality images and video satisfying both imperceptibility and robustness requirements. As discussed in Part-I, imperceptibility, robustness against moderate compression and processing, and the ability to hide many bits are the basic but competing requirements for many data hiding applications. The traditional way is to target at a specific payload-robustness pair, and follow one of two approaches: to embed just one or a few bits very robustly [49, 58, 105, 106, 109, 113], or to embed a lot of bits but to tolerate little or no distortion [67, 69, 108, 139]. Such a single robustness target generally overestimates the noise condition in some situations and/or underestimates in some other situations. Also, some data, such as the ownership information and the control information for facilitating the decoding of a large amount of payload bits, should be embedded more robustly than others. It is therefore desirable to design a data hiding system that is capable of conveying secondary data in high rate when noise is not severe and can still convey some data reliably under severe processing [110, 111, 112]. This is analogous to the graceful degradation by unequal error protection (UEP) in communication.