Defining embedding distortion for intra prediction mode-based video steganography

In this paper, an effective intra prediction mode-based video strganography is proposed. Secret messages are embedded during the intra prediction of the video encoding without causing large embedding impact. The influence on the sum of absolute difference (SAD) in intra prediction modes (IPMs) reversion phenomenon is sharp when modifying IPMs. It inspires us to take the SAD prediction deviation (SPD) to define the distortion function. What’s more, the mapping rule between IPMs and the codewords is introduced to further reduce the SPD values of each intra block. Syndrome-trellis code (STC) is used as the practical embedding implementation. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed steganographic scheme presents high undetectability compared with existing IPMs-based steganographic approaches. It also outperforms these schemes on stego video quality.