A novel information hiding method for H.266/VVC based on selections of luminance transform and chrominance prediction modes

This paper proposes a novel information hiding method designed for H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC) compressed video streams. In this work, we explore two exclusive tools in H.266/VVC standard, named Multiple Transform Selection (MTS) and Cross-component linear model (CCLM), to embed information. These two tools are utilized to preserve high video reconstruction quality and compression efficiency as well as enhance embedding capacity. In specific, MTS is for embedding information into luminance blocks by modifying the selections of coding transforms. Comparing with other tools, MTS has less significant impact on compression quality and efficiency. In addition, CCLM is further used to embed information into chrominance blocks to further enlarge the embedding capacity with little impact on the other two metrics. To our best knowledge, it is the first information hiding method exclusively designed for H.266/VVC. Experimental results show that our proposed information hiding method ensures high embedding capacity, remarkable video reconstruction quality and insignificant impact on compression efficiency, which achieves a better overall performances comparing to existing methods for compressed video.