Hiding depth information into H.264 compressed video using reversible watermarking

A scheme is proposed to hide 3D information (depth map) into H.264 compressed video using reversible watermarking. The watermark embedder works jointly with the H.264 encoder with concern of bit rate control and low complexity. The depth information is hidden in the quantized DCT domain of the compressed video in our proposed method. The bit-shift operation is used for watermarking to shift the energy distribution of the quantized DCT coefficients for the purpose of bit rate control and low calculation complexity. Further more, the decoder at the receiver side can restore the original video without quality loss after the watermark is extracted. The experimental results show that the watermarking capacity is large enough for hiding the related depth information of the cover video sequence. Besides, the watermarked video size is smaller than the sum of original video sequence plus the hidden depth information, which means that our watermarking method can secure the depth information while save the transmission bandwidth for depth information.