A study in how to inject steganographic data into videos in a sturdy and non-intrusive manner

Abstract: It is desirable for companies to be able to hide data inside videos to be able to find the source of any unauthorised sharing of a video. The hidden data (the payload) should damage the original data (the cover) by an as small amount as possible while also making it hard to remove the payload without also severely damaging the cover. It was determined that the most appropriate place to hide data in a video was in the visual information, so the cover is an image. Two injection methods were developed and three methods for attacking the payload. One injection method changes the pixel values of an image directly to hide the payload and the other transforms the image to cosine waves that represented the image and it then changes those cosine waves to hide the payload. Attacks were developed to test how hard it was to remove the hidden data. The methods for attacking the payload where to add and remove a random value to each pixel, to set all bits of a certain importance to 1 or to compress the image with JPEG. The result of the study was that the method that changed the image directly was significantly faster than the method that transformed the image and it had a capacity for a larger payload. The injection methods protected the payload differently well against the various attacks so which method that was the best in that regard depends on the type of attack.