Improving Embedding Efficiency of Covering Codes for Applications in Steganography

In image steganography, each pixel can carry a ternary message by choosing adding/subtracting one to/from the gray value. Although ternary covering functions can provide embedding efficiency higher than binary ones, it is necessary to convert the binary message into a ternary format. We propose a novel method that improves the embedding efficiency of binary covering functions by fully exploiting the information contained in the choice of addition or subtraction in the embedding. The improved scheme can perform equally well with, or even outperform, ternary covering functions without ternary conversion of the message.

[1]  Antje Winkler,et al.  Embedding with syndrome coding based on BCH codes: The corrected version of this paper is now available as full text. To view the original document as presented in the printed proceedings (with its errors), download the supplemental file , 2006, MM&Sec '06.

[2]  Andreas Westfeld,et al.  F5-A Steganographic Algorithm , 2001, Information Hiding.

[3]  Xinpeng Zhang,et al.  Efficient Steganographic Embedding by Exploiting Modification Direction , 2006, IEEE Communications Letters.

[4]  J. Mielikainen.  LSB matching revisited , 2006, IEEE Signal Processing Letters.

[5]  Gregory A. Kabatiansky,et al.  Information hiding by coverings , 2003, Proceedings 2003 IEEE Information Theory Workshop (Cat. No.03EX674).

[6]  Yu-Chee Tseng,et al.  A secure data hiding scheme for binary images , 2002, IEEE Trans. Commun..

[7]  Jessica J. Fridrich,et al.  Matrix embedding for large payloads , 2006, IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics Secur..

[8]  Juergen Bierbrauer.  Introduction to coding theory , 2005, Discrete mathematics and its applications.

[9]  Jessica J. Fridrich,et al.  Constructing Good Covering Codes for Applications in Steganography , 2008, Trans. Data Hiding Multim. Secur..

[10]  R. Crandall,et al.  Some Notes on Steganography , 1999 .

[11]  Marten van Dijk,et al.  Capacity and codes for embedding information in gray-scale signals , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.