Decomposing Joint Distortion for Adaptive Steganography

• Published in: IEEE transactions on circuits and systems for video technology Vol. 27; no. 10; pp. 2274 - 2280
• Main Authors: Zhang, Weiming, Zhang, Zhuo, Zhang, Lili, Li, Hanyi, Yu, Nenghai
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01-10-2017; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Adaptation models; Additives; Computational complexity; Covert communication; Decomposition; Design modifications; Distortion; Encoding; Entropy; joint distortion; Lower bounds; nonadditive distortion; Pixels; State of the art; Steganography; Synchronism; Trellis coding
• ISSN: 1051-8215; 1558-2205
• DOI: 10.1109/TCSVT.2016.2587388

Recent advances on adaptive steganography imply that the security of steganography can be improved by exploiting the mutual impact of modifications between adjacent cover elements, such as pixels of images, which is called a nonadditive distortion model. In this paper, we propose a framework for nonadditive distortion steganography by defining joint distortion on pixel blocks. To reduce the complexity for minimizing joint distortion, we design a coding method to decompose the joint distortion (abbreviated to DeJoin) into distortion on individual pixels; thus, the message can be efficiently embedded with syndrome-trellis codes. We prove that DeJoin can approach the lower bound of joint distortion. As an example, we define joint distortion according to the principle of synchronizing modification direction and then design steganographic algorithms with DeJoin. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms previous nonadditive distortion steganography when resisting the state-of-the-art steganalysis.