Secure Information Delivery through High Bitrate Data Embedding within Digital Video and its Application to Audio/Video Synchronization

1. Introduction

Secure communication has been extensively studied in modern information and communication systems. Traditionally, the security of transmitted information is ensured with data encryption (Yang, Li & Bourbakis, 2004; Maniccam & Bourbakis, 2001). Nowadays, in order to enhance the level of security, researchers have started to utilize information hiding techniques, which conceal not only the content and location of the protected data, but also its very existence. In terms of the amount of data to be embedded, information hiding algorithms can be classified as high bitrate and low bitrate. According to modern information hiding theory, the embedding capability of the host video frames provides an additional communication channel with a certain capacity, which could be used to transmit secure data without degrading host video’s visual quality. The applications of high bitrate video information hiding include secure communication, captioning, speech-in-video, video-in-video, etc. (Yang & Bourbakis, 2005; Yang & Bourbakis, 2005). In high bitrate video information hiding, the following performance goals are mainly concerned:

• 1.

  Visual Transparency: The embedding data should not interfere with the visual fidelity of host video (Zhang, Cheung & Chen, 2005; Ni et al.,2004);

• 2.

  High Bitrate (also known as Channel Capacity): Large amount of data need to be effectively embedded (Cvejic & Seppiinen, 2004; Yang & Bourbakis, 2009; Kundur, 2000;Lin & Chang, 2001; Moulin&Mihcak, 2002; Mukherjee, Chae & Mitra, 1998; Wang & Izquierdo, 2002; Briffa & Das, 2002);

• 3.

  Blind Retrieval: The presence of original video contents should not be required for information extraction (Yang & Bourbakis, 2005; Yang & Bourbakis, 2005);

• 4.

  Robustness to lossy video codec: The embedded information should be robust to lossy video codec (Gunsel, Uludag & Tekalp, 2002; Fei, Kundur & Kwong, 2001; Ni et al., 2004);

• 5.

  Minimum impact to video compression: The impact to the performance of video codec should be minimized (Chang, Chen & Lin, 2004).