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Improving side-informed JPEG steganography using two-dimensional decomposition embedding method

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Abstract

Side-informed JPEG steganography is a renowned technology of concealing information for the high resistance to blind detection. The existed popular side-informed JPEG steganographic algorithms use binary embedding method with the corresponding binary distortion function. Then, the embedding methods and binary distortion functions of popular side-informed JPEG steganographic algorithms are analyzed and the wasted secure capacity by using the binary embedding operation is pointed out. Thus, the detection resistance of the side-informed JPEG steganographic algorithms can be improved if the embedding operation is changed to ternary mode which causes less changes than binary embedding at same payload. The problem of using ternary embedding is to define a suitable ternary distortion function. To solve this, a two-dimensional decomposition embedding method is proposed in this paper. The proposed ternary distortion function is defined by transforming the problem into two different binary distortion functions of two layers that based on the ternary entropy decomposition. Meanwhile, the proposed method ensures the minimal value of the distortion function on each layer can be reached in theory. Several popular side-inform JPEG steganographic algorithms (NPQ, EBS, and SI-UNIWARD) are improved through defining ternary distortion function by the proposed method. The experimental results on parameters, blind detection and processing time show that the proposed method increases the blind detection resistance of side-informed steganographic algorithm with acceptable computation complexity.

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Notes

  1. It is easy to extend the steganographic algorithms of grayscale image to color image if considering the three channels of color image is independent to each other, and the databases of the side-informed JPEG steganographic algorithms NPQ, EBS and UNIWARD are grayscale images. Thus, this paper focuses on the grayscale images, and the well-known database BOSSbase ver. 1.01 is used in the experiments.

  2. Proposed by Patrick Bas, Tomas Filler, Tomas Pevny in ICASSP 2013, contains 10,000 512 × 512 grayscale images, available: http://agents.fel.cvut.cz/stegodata/

  3. Actually, the value of T can also be changed in the CC method, but this will significantly increase the number of the candidate images, and the experimental results showed in the Fig. 5 implies that the effect of T-value stay steady in [0.1, 0.3], thus, the CC method just changes the values of β.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61379151, 61272489, 61572452 and 61572052), the National Natural Science Youth Foundation of China (No. 61302159, 61401512), the Excellent Youth Foundation of Henan Province of China (No. 144100510001), and the Foundation of Science and Technology on Information Assurance Laboratory (No. KJ-14-108).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Mathematical Engineering and Advanced Computing, Zhengzhou, 450001, China

    Zhenkun Bao, Xiangyang Luo, Chunfang Yang & Fenlin Liu

  2. CAS Key Laboratory of Electromagnetic Space Information, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China

    Weiming Zhang

  3. Science and Technology on Information Assurance Laboratory, Beijing, 100072, China

    Chunfang Yang

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  1. Zhenkun Bao
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  2. Xiangyang Luo
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  4. Chunfang Yang
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  5. Fenlin Liu
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Correspondence to Xiangyang Luo.

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Bao, Z., Luo, X., Zhang, W. et al. Improving side-informed JPEG steganography using two-dimensional decomposition embedding method. Multimed Tools Appl 76, 14345–14374 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-016-3823-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-016-3823-2

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