Data Hiding in Film Grain

Abstract

This paper presents a data hiding technique based on a new compression enhancement called Film Grain Technology. Film grain is a mid-frequency noise-like pattern naturally appearing in imagery captured on film. The Film Grain Technology is a method for modeling and removing the film grain, thus enhancing the compression efficiency, and then using the model parameters to create synthetic film grain at the decoder. We propose slight modifications to the decoder that enable the synthetic film grain to represent metadata available at the decoder. We examine a number of implementation approaches and report results of fidelity and robustness experiments.