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A distortion cost modification strategy for adaptive pentary steganography

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Abstract

In this paper, a pentary steganography scheme is proposed employing the multi-layered STCs, which takes the embedding interactions into consideration. First, based on the definition of local correlation for the four-neighborhood, we link the modification direction of the central pixel with that of its four-neighborhood. Secondly, a modification degree strategy (MDS) is proposed to adjust the costs of the pixels dynamically. And the cost of pixels is assigned utilizing the MDS, which divides the process of distortion calculation into two steps of initializing and updating distortion cost. Finally, the scheme is obtained incorporating the MDS with the existing adaptive scheme S-UNIWARD of pentary version. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme is capable of providing large capacity, and has a better performance than adaptive steganography scheme S-UNIWARD of pentary version in resisting the SRM and maxSRMd2 detection when the payload is larger than 0.5 bpp. Also, the strategy could be combined with other adaptive steganography schemes of pentary version. Besides, the proposed scheme outperforms some ternary adaptive schemes with both feature sets SRM and maxSRMd2 when the payload is from 0.05bpp to 0.5bpp.

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Acknowledgments

The authors appreciate the anonymous reviewers and thank the members of DDE Laboratory in SUNY Binghamton for sharing their implementation codes. Also, the authors thank Professor Bin Li and his student Ming Wang from the College of Information Engineering, ShenZhen University, for providing the CMD code and useful advice.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Zhengzhou Information Science and Technology Institute, Zhengzhou, People’s Republic of China

    Yuan Bian, Zhanzhan Gao & Shuo Wang

  2. Department of Information Security, Zhengzhou Information Science and Technology Institute, Zhengzhou, People’s Republic of China

    Guangming Tang

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  1. Yuan Bian
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  2. Guangming Tang
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  3. Zhanzhan Gao
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  4. Shuo Wang
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Correspondence to Yuan Bian.

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Bian, Y., Tang, G., Gao, Z. et al. A distortion cost modification strategy for adaptive pentary steganography. Multimed Tools Appl 76, 20643–20662 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-016-3986-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-016-3986-x

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