Abstract
As the most commonly used entropy coding method of H.264, CAVLC (context-based adaptive variable length coding) has been widely utilized for information hiding. Various information hiding methods directly manipulate CAVLC coefficients, which are reported to be of high payload and low computational complexity. However, things are quite different in real applications. This paper addresses two misconceptions about them: (1) The CAVLC coefficients can be modified without re-encoding process. In fact, direct modifications of the number of non-zero coefficients will change the corresponding code tables for adjacent blocks and result in decoding errors. (2) CAVLC codewords can be indiscriminately substituted. Actually, it will cause serious distortion drifts. In addition, considering steganographic security, a detection strategy is proposed based on statistical analysis of some CAVLC-based methods.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the NSFC under U1636102 and U1536105, and National Key Technology R&D Program under 2014BAH41B01, 2016YFB0801003 and 2016QY15Z2500.
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You, W., Cao, Y., Zhao, X. (2017). Information Hiding Using CAVLC: Misconceptions and a Detection Strategy. In: Kraetzer, C., Shi, YQ., Dittmann, J., Kim, H. (eds) Digital Forensics and Watermarking. IWDW 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10431. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64185-0_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64185-0_15
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