Computers and Electrical Engineering 81 (2020) 106541 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Computers and Electrical Engineering journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/compeleceng Efficient embedding and retrieval of information for high-resolution videos coded with HEVC ✩ D. Rodríguez Galiano a , A.A. Del Barrio a,∗ , G. Botella a , D. Cuesta b a Department of Computer Architecture and Automation, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain b Technical Direction, Administrador de Infraestructuras Ferroviarias, Madrid, Spain a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 14 December 2018 Revised 10 December 2019 Accepted 18 December 2019 Keywords: Steganography Steganalysis HEVC Video coding Real-time a b s t r a c t Steganography is the art of hiding information within a file. This work focuses on embed- ding such information in videos. In this scenario, it is critical to comply with the latest video standard, namely: the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), which allows reducing the size of the file to be transmitted. In this paper we propose an HEVC-compliant method to hide and retrieve information in high-resolution videos. The procedure is based on mod- ifying the luminance of certain blocks, not the HEVC encoder. Nevertheless, this must be carefully done, as the HEVC standard is a powerful attack in itself, since it compresses 50% the size of the video on average and the embedded information may disappear. Results show that it is possible to retrieve all the information while maintaining the quality of the video when using intra frames. Furthermore, the proposed flow has shown to be resilient to state-of-the-art steganalysis attacks. © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Nowadays, video and multimedia content are dominating the Internet. According to a report by Cisco [1], by 2021, global IP traffic will reach 3.3 ZB and online video will be responsible for 82% of this traffic. Furthermore, we are moving towards tremendous resolutions as 4k and 8k, so efficiently employing the bandwidth is a must. High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is the latest video coding standard of the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC). HEVC noticeably improves compression performance when compared with previous standards such as H.264 and represents a major step forward in video compression technology. However, this improvement is achieved by increasing the complexity of the encoding process. HEVC employs a novel flexible quad-tree coding block partitioning structure [2] that enables the use of large and multi-sized coding, prediction, and transform blocks. This system is more efficient but also more computationally demanding. The HEVC standard is designed to achieve multiple goals: coding efficiency (in the range of 50%-bit rate reduction for equal perceptual video quality compared with the antecessor H.264/AVC standard), transport system integration and data loss resilience, as well as real-time implementations using parallel processing architectures [2]. Prior to deploying hardware solutions, developers test their approaches to comply with the standard using the reference software HM-16.2 (HEVC Test Model) [3]. This is a simulation software that is being developed by the Joint Collaborative ✩ This paper is for regular issues of CAEE. Reviews processed and recommended for publication to the Editor-in-Chief by Area Editor Dr. M. Malek. ∗ Corresponding author. E-mail address: abarriog@ucm.es (A.A. Del Barrio). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compeleceng.2019.106541 0045-7906/© 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.