Patent ID: 8515123

Claim:
A method of imperceptibly embedding information in a compressed video bitstream, comprising: analyzing the compressed bitstream using a pre-processor to identify locations that can be imperceptibly modified, where the imperceptible modification includes replacing original content using replacement content derived from elsewhere in the compressed bitstream to remove at least a portion of the original content; generating at least one piece of replacement data for each identified location using the pre-processor, where overwriting a portion of the compressed bitstream with any of the pieces of replacement data prevents a decoder from decoding original content and causes a decoder to decode replacement content derived from elsewhere in the compressed bitstream; selecting pieces of replacement data using an embedding device, wherein overwriting portions of the compressed bitstream using the selected pieces of replacement data encodes payload information in accordance with a predetermined coding scheme; and embedding the payload information in the compressed bitstream by using the embedding device to overwrite at least a portion of the compressed bitstream with the selected replacement data.